Keeping Dreamseeds

"Let tiredness and darkness engulf you. Learn how to move through the spirit world of seeds and find a path for I-Remnunt."

Keeping Dreamseeds: The Death of the Antin is a interactive speculative fiction about cooking, dreaming and saving seeds. Play as D'lo, a grower and a chef, who has been tasked with finding a path for her settlement, I-Remnunt, after the death of one of their key crops; the antin. Explore the deserted ruins of a deserted London in the deep future through D'lo's diary and find clues to help you navigate a dreamseed ceremony and communicate with seed spirits. Find recipes from magical insects, read about ingredients that helped humanity through difficult times and find future recipes for your settlement.

This world building in this story is based on Black feminist principles, decolonial relational philosophy, and Indigenous American ecological wisdom. The work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Édouard Glissant, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Rowen White are central to the story, and so I give thanks for their work. This story actively tries to imagine a society grounded in collective love, for one another, for one's environment, for all the more-than-human animals in one's environments, and most importantly, love for food.

This game is intended to be played on a custom e-reader/camera hybrid I've made. This means it's coded in openFrameworks, which was quite a hassle. Below is a digital port of the game that can be interacted with the following controls.

Controls:

Up and down scroll the text

A: enter and make decisions with

B: make decisions with

C: make decisions with

Space Bar: panic button

Note: Please go slow in the game, both for the sake of the story, but also because of my shoddy coding. If you get stuck somewhere, don't worry, its me, not you, just press the space bar to return to the menu and then try again.

Credits: the fonts used in this game are both from the wonderful typographer lazy_dog.ttf