important links
about the project
An Index of Prayer was a game jam entry made in two weeks for the thatgamejam #01, hosted by thatgamecompany. I got 14th out of 251 entries in the Community’s Voice competition. The theme of the jam was a silhouette image of the hands in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam (shown below).
I decided to make a game about the relationship between the divine and the mortal. Specifically, I wanted to explore prayer and human need. I ended up creating a game where players control a monk who is tasked by their god with finding the answer to an impossible question: what do humans need? To do this, the monk must talk to their paritioners to learn their prayers (most of which are actual prayers submitted by players) and sort them into a list of subjective categories.
making the game
An Index of Prayer was built in GameMaker. I wanted to explore two new things while making this game, namely, database integration with Google Firebase Firestore and sprite stacking. Using Firestore, I let players submit their own prayers at the end of the game, which may end up in another player’s game. I used sprite stacking, a technique that involves manipulating 2D slices of a 3D model to create a fake 3D effect, to create the characters in the game. I used MagicaVoxel to create the characters and animated them in-game with code.
The game’s aesthetic drew from Arnold Böcklin’s painting, Isle of the Dead, and I used a custom dither shader to create the colors for the game. The music was created by KaktusDoesMusic, whom I met through the jam, and can be found linked on this page.
