No (Hu)Man’s Yard For the Civic Jam last weekend my friend Luca and me worked together on a game we jokingly called “No Man’s Yard”. We had to name the game only an hour into the 8 hour game jam. Allthough we strarted with this very referential name our idea was quite different from the premise of the heavily referenced title. The civic jam was conceived as an event to bring together game developers and activists. The idea is to have a series of game jams which cover the topics nature, human & machine. The theme of this first jam was nature. As much as I like the idea of games being able to adress serious topics and therefore maybe even having a social impact I felt that this premise was a bit overwhelming considering the 8 hour time limit. To make things worse we could not imagine to create a game mechanic which wasn’t just trying to educate the player based on some eco good or bad decisions reducing the game to basically a quiz with a quantifiable result. Apart from that Luca and me didn’t want to stress out ourselfs too much during the jam (it was also the weekend of the slow jam!!). We wanted to talk about the importance of our only home - earth - in a purely emotional way. I am pretty positive that the climate change denying Trump administrations actions as of late have played a big role in the forming of this idea. No Human’s Yard is based on the premise that there is no earth anymore and it does not matter why. Your home is gone and you are drifting through the universe. You are placed on one of the infinite planets in this Universe.
You need to decide which one to make your new home or keep traveling forever. If you decided to move on to the next planet there is no going back. If you did not stay you have lost this home forever. That’s it. There is nothing to do but to wander around or move on.
Clicking the left mouse button places you on the next planet. Just before you leave the game takes a hires photo and places it in the game folder. You can try the builds here: OSX Win Please post photos of the worlds you have lost and tell me @firepunchd
Simon
P.s. Allthough I find some of the worlds fairly beautiful they are dead of course. Devoid of companions and life. When I played and took some photos something stranged happened. The search for a new home accelerated. The more planets I’ve seen the quicker I moved on to see the next one which might be nicer or more beautiful. Finding a place became less probable. I became more homeless.
