The Nymph’s Laugh

In this game (which I created in about less than a week for the Adventure Game Challenge 2022), a young farmer named Avon has ventured into the mystic marshes, looking for his wife, a nymph. To reach her, Avon must learn to read emotions other than his own human feelings.

This story is inspired by a short tale that I have read in a book by Brian Froud. The tale of a misunderstanding between a human and a nymph because she can't express emotions well in human ways has always resonated with me.

My impetus to make this game for the Adventure Game Challenge was to take the opportunity to get something done quickly and not get carried away by perfectionism.

In order to create this game as quickly as possible, the game's backgrounds as well as the base images for the protagonist's closeup were AI-generated, but then edited by myself. This might be considered artistically questionable, so I want to be honest about this.

Although the game's puzzle mechanic is always the same, each playthrough is a little bit different, as all major elements revolving around the puzzle are randomized [MILD SPOILERS]:

• NPCs' positions, poses, tints, emotions, and texts are randomized.
• The locations of puzzle-items are randomly scattered.
• The correspondence between emotions and expressions gets shuffled, which also affects the puzzle-combination.
  
• The nymphs' language is procedurally generated according to a pre-determined phonetic rule-set.