Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is a sad game about dogs, moms, and memory. 🥲

For this theme, rather than introduce an element every 10 seconds, we thought it would be fun to make a player *lose* something every 10 seconds. In Eucalyptus, your character loses memories 10 seconds after she gains them, though scent can help her retain memories for longer.

The version we’re sharing here is a demo - we designed 7 days of gameplay & only successfully built a single half day 😂 We plan to continue building out the full version soon.

Team:

1. Alex! Tech + UX/UI

*Technical wizardry up the wazoo, a walking talking coding bonanza, got a little too lost in his homebrew scripting system that we didn't actually end up needing lol oops*

2. Ellie! Creative + Gameplay Design

*Endless fountain of stories, terrifying wielder of whiteboards, spent too much time wandering around the neighborhood with a camera and not enough time writing dialogue*

3. Pickles! Dog

*He has the best snoot*

Concepts:

- Memory as inventory
- Node graphs for memory mapping
- Branching dialogue with memory contingencies
- (eventually) Open world exploration
- (eventually) Path-dependent endings

Full Version - Ending:

In our full concept for the game, the goal is to find out as much as you can about why the character is losing her memory by the end of 7 days. The specific actions you take and memories you decide to save will unlock a collection of cut scenes unique to your journey, so every player ends the game with a different slice of story.

We did make 10 cut scenes (!) for the ending, with 5-7 toggle-able elements of "clarity" each - we just didn't finish making all of the adventures you'd need to have to unlock said cut scenes. (Yet.)

We want to aim for a player to be able to unlock about 5 or 6 cut scenes in one play-through because we love a game with good replayability.

Visuals:

We realized Friday around 10PM that neither of us really could make good enough art for this game from scratch. That's why we settled on a visual style that uses POV footage and a real-time rotoscope-ish shader.

Music:

Ellie did write an original song for the game, though it didn't have a home in the demo levels we completed this weekend. So we threw it over the credits :)

Testing:

We uhhhh never tested this all the way through so... hope it doesn't cause your computer to self destruct or anything

Story Logic:

😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫