Tall Bagel
7 Day FPS Jam happened recently, and Brendon Chung and I made a game together! It's called Tall Bagel.
Tall Bagel is an awkward dinner simulator where you're trapped with your mother, your uncle, and three family friends at a fancy restaurant. As the meal progresses, you are stuck listening to their alienating conversations with no means of making your desires known besides your long, long slimy frog tongue (LMB) and your deep frog croak (RMB).
Tall Bagel is a game I've wanted to make for a few months now! I pitched the game to Brendon when we first learned that 7 Day FPS would be happening in 2020, and the game as we shipped it is basically exactly the same one I pitched, minus VO. I believe the game would kick ass with silly, over-the-top, badly-acted voices, but it's simply not worth figuring out audio interruption mechanics for a week-long jam! Tall Bagel's player fantasy is the fantasy of disturbing people who are more powerful than you, and it wouldn't be nearly as satisfying if the interruptions weren't so sharp.
Brendon and I have worked on a few projects together during the pandemic and we're getting quite good at making games with scripting-heavy content systems. Planetfriend and another unreleased prototype used JSON for scripting (sorry… we know…) and Tall Bagel uses Yarn. For Tall Bagel, I was able to script character dialogue, head movements, food deliveries, waiter appearances, and so on. The game is also very easy to mod -- you could easily write your own conversation using Yarn and add your own models to the experience, and the game comes with a readme that explains how. I'd love to reuse this tech again someday for another simple vignette with a new core mechanic.
Because I've had practically no new life experiences in 2020 besides "sitting at home and being scared," I dug deep for this one and wrote a few really deep-cut Connecticut Jokes into it. If you hail from Connecticut and would like to see our bitter little state lightly mocked, I suppose this is the game for you!