This game was created for Clicker Jam Winter 2023. We had 10 days to create a clicker game based around the theme "Interdimensional".

 

Most clicker games have a unit that increases by 1 per click initially, and then as you upgrade it increments by larger and larger numbers, all of it being done to reach the final goal of an absurdly high number of units. We wanted to turn that idea on its head. What if, instead of starting low and increasing to high increments, you start high and go low? What if instead of the final goal being the biggest number, it's a number somewhere in the middle, and you can't reach it until you can increment by precisely just 1?

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Going into it, we wanted to interpret the theme in a time-travel sort of way. The unit by which we'd be counting would be days. Instead of starting at 1 click = 1 day however, the player would start at 1 click = 3650 days (or 1 decade). There would be a final day, that, once reached, would loop the player back to the first day, at which point they would then use a new measure of time to skip through the days. Those units would get smaller with each revisit of the timeline, going from decades, to years, months, weeks, to finally single days. Each cycle would take more and more clicks to complete, similar to how in most traditional clickers the milestones become more and more spaced out. Unlike traditional clickers however, you'd be working within the same range of numbers, with them instead becoming fleshed out in-between.

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With those mechanics in mind, we needed story context for why it plays like this. The idea the pair of us landed on was of someone exploring memories of their life, with their final goal being to find a memory that occurred on one specific day. Fleshing this out further, we set the day range to 10,950 days (or 30 years), at the end of which this person died. After becoming a ghost, they don't remember anything, so they decide to travel back in time to learn about what kind of life they lived, and find the happiest day of their life.

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We needed to give the player goals along the way, so we introduced collectible polaroids into the game. These would be hidden within the dialogue text on days when special life events occured. By collecting these, the player unlocks the next increment to search by, allowing them to find more memories and more polaroids. These polaroids also have hand-drawn visuals of what the characters and events looked like, giving the player a closer connection to the narrative. Once all incrememnts have been unlocked and enough polaroids have been collected, the player recieves a strong final hint towards pinpointing the date of the happiest day, and finishing the game.

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I worked on the art and dialogue for this game, as well as on the game design and story together with the other dev.

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In March 2023, snapshot had the honor of being presented at the GDC'23 New York Pavilion as a part of the Mayor's Office Booth, being shown as an example of current CUNY student works to promote the city's in-the-works gaming pathways education program.

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In April 2023, Shroomies was accepted into RPI GameFest, where it was tabled alongside several other student games from schools across New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. At the awards ceremony, snapshot won the Excellence in Narrative Award and $500.

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Programmed and co-designed by Bian Pasiliao.

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Play on itch.io