Experience a short establishing chapter of a visual novel concept for the Gameboy Color. Meet the employees at Citizen:RE! Enter the world, young robot, and shake the hand of your emergent personhood.

[This concept and game were built out over two weeks during CYBRPUNK JAM 006]

///// CONTROLS

Browser Arrow keys control cursor, Z interacts
Gameboy D-pad controls cursor, A interacts

///// COMMENTARY

This is my wholehearted attempt to make a mechanically engaging visual novel for the Gameboy Color. Scope creep is real, so even though I wrote pages upon pages, and have half a dozen more character illustrations, I really tried to hone in on the mechanics and systems of dialogue for this demo. It turned into a prologue for a more ambitious game project that I want to keep working on!
A month before this jam started,  I got laid off from a 7 year career at a nonprofit tech job that had a lot of financial issues. My two biggest responsibilities were teaching middle school students the basics of computer literacy and processing donated laptops from tobacco companies. While I had a lot of freedom in what I taught (Mostly GB Studio and Aseprite), the framework for how these classes were pitched was often in terms of career and job potential. At some point, you can't ignore the creeping idea that to some degree, you're doing Amazon job training for children. I moved out of teaching and purely into IT, where I learned that a strong indicator of collapse is a managerial trend towards rigidity and order. Insulate yourself with yes-men and money and collapse couldn't possibly happen, never mind the increasing waves of layoffs.

///// INSPIRATION

Danganronpa
VA-11 Hall-A
Severance
Haibane Renmei
The oppressively uplifting tone of corporate culture
5 cups of coffee before noon

///// CREDITS

Game by Mothtown
Music by Takuma Okada 
Condensed fonts set by edo999
Sound effects (GBFX and GBFX2)  by Tronimal
Built in GB Studio
Thank you to my wife, moonhanded, who helped shape the mechanics and voice of the game.