you are a ghost

you are a ghost. you haunt the world, drifting through life as you stay in your cycle of work and sleep.

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My obsession I chose is ghosts, which I picked because of their flexibility as literal dead and metaphorical dead. As someone with depression and anxiety, some days I feel like a ghost in the world just repeating the same old actions, and I wanted to convey some of this feeling to the player through this game. It's hard to work with mental illness, and sometimes it feels like the options you have to do in a day narrow down to one, but you have to make an attempt to treat yourself well or else you'll never escape the cycle and you'll have an even worse fate befall you.

I chose to work with a looping structure similar to Queers at the End of the World, but players would escape the loop if terrible or great choices were chosen. The game requires the player to participate in the gameplay loop and choose events that are different from simply going along with work and sleep if they want to achieve an ending, whether that ending is good or bad.

From playtesting, my structure stayed very similar as I went through. I would often iterate my structure and test it myself to make sure there were no bugs. Then I sent my game to friends to try, mostly online due to time constraints (I know in person testing was recommended!), and they were fine with my stylistic choices, even the ones I had worried were too repetitive. It seemed my greatest enemy was myself, or that I had caught everything wrong before they played.