Seasons (Greetings)
Every once in a while I get the urge to make something artsy. This is a short collection of "poetic vignettes"
I created over a couple of weeks, partially inspired (in concept more than in execution) by Ian Bogost's
"
A Slow Year", and
Brendon Chung's
short-form games like "Gravity Bone" and "
Thirty Flights of Loving".
(It was also less-directly inspired by "
Gone Home"
and "
Dear Esther", both of which I'd played shortly before starting on this.)
I used it to experiment with technical and game design elements like "unmoving plaid", a few different flavors of
third-person camera, and various physics things, and cinematic techniques like match cuts and creative geography.
I keep thinking I'm not one of those "pretentious artsy indie devs", and then I say stuff like
"poetic vignettes" and "creative geography", and then people point out to me that my first name is a letter.
A couple months after I finished this, the
Holiday Game Jam was announced.
They specified that they were being pretty "fast and loose" with the jam-ness (usually a game only counts as being
"for a jam" if it's made entirely between the time the jam is announced and when it ends), so I figured that since
I'd made this game in a couple of weeks that was close enough. I put a santa hat on the character, changed the name
from "Seasons" to "Seasons Greetings", and ta-da! Game jam entry!
I had misgivings for a long time afterward about making it a "holiday game", so in 2019 I updated it to make the hat
only appear if it's December, and made
a version that will run in VR.
Download:
Seasons (Greetings) for Windows
Seasons Greetings for Mac
Seasons Greetings for Linux
Seasons (Greetings) VR on itch.io