Connecting by AlexDJones
Waiting at London Heathrow airport for a connecting flight home, you receive a text from your partner, Sam. As you begin to talk, Sam asks you about your night out with your friend Robin, at which point the conversation becomes awkward.
Connecting is about relationships - your relationship to Sam, to Robin, and to the game text itself. As you pick responses, not only do you change the direction that the dialogue takes, but you also retroactively change the context of the conversation because the game doesn't impose a canon on the player. Maybe you confess an indiscretion to Sam, or you lie about it, or maybe there never was one and Sam's questions are unfair.
Written and programmed by Alex D. Jones with art by Sandy Gardner. Made using Game Maker Studio, Photoshop CS2 and bfxr.
Unfortunately this is only available for Windows. Apparently Chrome gets ornery about the .zip download, so I've added an itch.io link which sometimes fixes that problem.
Connecting is about relationships - your relationship to Sam, to Robin, and to the game text itself. As you pick responses, not only do you change the direction that the dialogue takes, but you also retroactively change the context of the conversation because the game doesn't impose a canon on the player. Maybe you confess an indiscretion to Sam, or you lie about it, or maybe there never was one and Sam's questions are unfair.
Written and programmed by Alex D. Jones with art by Sandy Gardner. Made using Game Maker Studio, Photoshop CS2 and bfxr.
Unfortunately this is only available for Windows. Apparently Chrome gets ornery about the .zip download, so I've added an itch.io link which sometimes fixes that problem.
Ratings
| Coolness | 46% | 1364 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.32 | 312 |
| Audio(Jam) | 3.00 | 401 |
| Fun(Jam) | 2.83 | 499 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.00 | 518 |
| Humor(Jam) | 3.50 | 75 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.26 | 253 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.43 | 201 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.08 | 423 |
Cool design though, keep it up!
I like the uncertainty of this kind of narrative. You are entering a conversation that is only a fragment of a person's life -- you have to piece together what has happened, and afterwords you are not sure what will happen. All you know is that fragment, that moment of time. I like that a lot as a gameplay and narrative device. So, contrary to some others, I don't really want a conclusion rounding everything up -- that's boring to me. The uncertainty is what leaves it lingering in my mind, and it's what makes me want to replay and ponder.
What I maybe would have liked is for the conversation itself to be a bit more extensive and last for longer. It felt a bit too brief for a conversation that could dramatically affect their relationship. But maybe people are terser in text messages than me? And, of course, you're limited in what you can do in 72 hours, which I wholly understand.
Oh, and the background audio sounds -- the crowds and muffled chitter-chatter -- upped the immersion too.
Someone else mentioned the possibility of missing the flight if you got too involved in the conversation or something? I thought that was an interesting idea to consider -- not sure if it would work, but there's something there, I think.
Anyway, overall it gets top marks -- nice work!