Eucalyptus by Coderah

[raw]
made by Coderah for Ludum Dare 51 (JAM)

Eucalyptus is a sad game about dogs, moms, and memory. πŸ₯²

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 πŸ˜‚ We plan to continue building out the full version soon.

pickles snoot.png

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

  1. 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

  1. 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:

memory map Large Medium.jpeg

πŸ˜΅β€πŸ’«πŸ˜΅β€πŸ’«πŸ˜΅β€πŸ’«

Ratings

Overall 446th 3.643⭐ 16πŸ§‘β€βš–οΈ
Fun 860th 3.071⭐ 16πŸ§‘β€βš–οΈ
Innovation 7th 4.464⭐ 16πŸ§‘β€βš–οΈ
Theme 863th 3.357⭐ 16πŸ§‘β€βš–οΈ
Graphics 494th 3.75⭐ 16πŸ§‘β€βš–οΈ
Humor 651th 2.708⭐ 14πŸ§‘β€βš–οΈ
Mood 290th 3.75⭐ 16πŸ§‘β€βš–οΈ
Given 15πŸ—³οΈ 2πŸ—¨οΈ

Feedback

DileriumL
04. Oct 2022 Β· 00:22 UTC
Never seen game like that. Very original idea
goody
04. Oct 2022 Β· 00:40 UTC
Really neat idea. I miss pickles now
saintchristopher777
04. Oct 2022 Β· 01:28 UTC
LOVE the ideas and concepts here! Would def take a ton of work to finish the whole thing, but seems worth it. Also, the visuals reminded me of the FMV in games fad in the mid 90s (but much better, obv)! :-D

Great work! Would love to play the 7-day version if you finish it!
🎀 Coderah
04. Oct 2022 Β· 01:52 UTC
Thanks everyone! Pickles is really excited about all the positive comments <3 :D
Linnea Isaac
04. Oct 2022 Β· 04:29 UTC
Of course, you didn't get to get the whole system out, but by the end I was starting to realize a little how the memory system worked. I liked the fmv / rotoscope style and a game like that with movement (even not truly free movement, but point and click style scrolling) would be pretty cool

And I loved the song :)

You dreamed big but also put something out. It would be interesting to seeing iterations on some of these ideas
okshirl
04. Oct 2022 Β· 12:54 UTC
This was such a unique idea, please keep working on it! I didn't really understand what the placeholders were supposed to be, but it made the game more mysterious. I liked how the filter made the game more stylistically similar to those telltale games, but in some scenes it was getting a bit too dark, not sure if that's adjustable. Pickles was so cute! please give pickles lots of treats and love.
🎀 Coderah
04. Oct 2022 Β· 19:37 UTC
Thank you so much for the kind words and feedback everyone! <3

Wanted to note that the PLACEHOLDER text showing up on memories was an unfortunate bug, when I ran the final release I had incorrectly copied the spreadsheet into a data file and it didn't load right! Whoops :D it is now resolved though!
shogeku
05. Oct 2022 Β· 00:25 UTC
This was super nice to experience. I'd absolutely love to play a longer version of this game! The song at the end was beautiful. I'd love to have more environmental sounds in the game. maybe use audio only queues in leu of us having smellivision? The memory system linking to your choices was nice.
tetrapteryx
08. Oct 2022 Β· 20:15 UTC
The visual style is SO cool, I would love to play a full length game like this! Losing memories is a really interesting way to handle the theme. I hope you continue with this!
Cookie_CHR
10. Oct 2022 Β· 22:21 UTC
Like every good demos, It made me want to play the full game. Keep up the good work! I have the eerie feeling I shouldn't have chosen to forget about the neighbor...
Misfire_dev
11. Oct 2022 Β· 19:55 UTC
the effects on the footage is a really nice touch, this is gonna be a really good game when fleshed out. I really enjoyed my short time in it
LDJam user 278918
20. Oct 2022 Β· 13:58 UTC
Really interesting idea! It reminded me a lot of Sam Barlow's games, like Her Story and Immortality. And tell Pickles he did a great job, much act very wow.