Brainxious

Push anxiety out of the way and all tasks and duties deeper into your brain!
as if it only could be done so easily...

This time, the theme was a hard one for me, I kept a long time brainstorming and nothing really came to my mind except an idea for a previous ludum dare, where you would play as a hostage negotiatior in hilarious situations. But as life is not super easy these days, this idea of stuffing tasks in your brain came up. I don´t know if it is really fun or a game, but it is something that didnt let me go. Even as my hard drive died on the second day (in typical gamejam fashion) I salvages what I could, rewrote the lost code and kept at it, because I didnt want to forfeit.

I am very happy with the graphics. Although crude and simple I made sure almost everything moves and changes. The hand wanders around the brain like a clock and looks older the longer you play. The brain jiggles more frenetically with the stress and when the game is over there is some time to relax. Originally I planned to do something with photos as graphics and focus on sound and music before the theme was announced, but maybe next time there is time for that.

Putting gameplay and depth into this thing was super hard. My message I wanted to convey and typical gamey stats stuff didn´t play along niceley together. So either it was boring if you play it right, or too chaotic to be a game. I stepped away from a semi linear story as you play to getting random tasks and worries that you just have to contain inside your brain. During prototyping I tried to go for a point scoring system to balance your work/life or keep a certain amount of items (eg 2 hearts, 1 clock and a tweet) in mind. Sadly also sound had to be scrapped due to the day 2 debacle of my dying hard drive. Ultimately though I am contempt with what it became and even more, its kind of a callback to last years entry, where I let you experience the stressful life of a bagel factory worker.