DevLog 3 (GET IN)

The roles we have chosen for this project are based on our strengths. With our combined abilities of Game Designer, Artist, and Crafter, the remaining roles were contributed naturally between us. We have used our combined strengths to come up with an idea we feel is both relevant and interesting, relating to the overall theme.

We are Papercut Games and the game we’ve made is called “GET IN”. The game is about a person trying to fill a form to be accepted into a dystopian alternate reality. More specifically, the user answers questions, ranging from unfair to absurd, in order to try to ‘win’ the game.

We have furthered the aesthetics of our game, by highlighting certain aspects of getting accepted into a new country. The feeling you might have by filling such a form, comes with a lot of pressure, stress, horror, and potentially hopelessness. See, the questions in such forms are both difficult and strange. We’ve established these feelings in the game, by playing around with eerie music, dark visuals, and unfairness.

Unfairness is the main theme of the project. The game tries to fail you. The questions are designed to keep you away from the country. This feeling is very relevant in our modern world for many, and is emphasized in our game. By taking inspiration from Papers, Please and The Impossible Quiz, we’ve made our research of how unfairness makes you feel. And we’ve used that feeling in a societal context. Now YOU can feel the hopelessness of an unfair system.

Our focus was as mentioned before, on how fairness can be twisted into unfairness. Our game makes it look like you can enter our fictive country, Equitasia, by having them take a test. But the reality is much darker since the game makes you unable to complete the test, which is our way to make a mockery of the current climate of anti-immigration. Our game also satirizes the rule of law, since our game takes place in an authoritarian regime, where rule of law is not something that helps people thrive, but something to keep people down and obeying. This also goes into, how our game wants to make the idea that all people deserve human rights, even refugees and immigrants. By exaggerating the impossibility of entering a country, a human right, by making the game absurd and difficult, we’ve made it clear that this is a relevant problem in our society

We use a lot of ideas from Colony Howl (San-San), with the alternate timeline. Our game uses the same idea of taking a past idea of the future, which we signify by using retro technology and analog systems. We also use a lot of imagery from the former GDR. More specifically, we’ve used inspiration from San-San for our aesthetic whilst playing the game. The colours, technology and overall theme fits with the San-San universe. When zooming out, the world is revealed. It is strange, weird, dystopian. We’ve emphasized this feel by making it appear as a bunker. We’ve also taking some creative liberties by giving the outro a neon-light red aesthetic (like the artwork “Milkrun III”) and giving the scene eerie sounds (like the artwork “Dawn Hours in the Naighbours House”)