And For A Moment I Shivered In Awe Because The Artificial Snowflakes Seem So Real When Viewed From Inside A Glass Sphere

"It is not us who are lost in contemplation of the world.

It is the world that is lost in contemplation of us."

- On the Silver Globe [Na srebrnym globie] (Dir.: Andrzej Żuławski, POL 1988)

Snow Globe Game, or: And For A Moment I Shivered In Awe Because The Artificial Snowflakes Seem So Real When Viewed From Inside A Glass Sphere is both a visual snow globe toy, and a first-person exploration game set within said snow globe. It was developed within about 7 days (might not include several night shifts) over the course of December 2023 for the Secret Santa Jam 2023.  This game jam has the very lovely concept of sending a person a digital letter, that's why I participated once more despite having lots of other projects to work on.

This game features artistic nudity as part of some marble statues in the introductory scene of this twisted cyborgian-eutopian garden, idk if this would already count as NSFW. The field I interacted with before, literature, doesn't really have these kinds of labels.

This game was inspired by a letter by/is dedicated to manmellon, whose letter mentioned games like the Portal and The Talos Principle games, which one can find very explicitly referenced in my game. But I was mainly inspired by a discord post by jam organizer kya as well, who shared media material of a snow globe in November, and I thought that it would be nice to design an entire snow globe for the purpose of using it as a game's setting, and this was the challenge I set myself here. Usually, a snow globe features just like one little figure or sth, but to think about this spheric space as a more maximalist, densely packed and detailed instead of a minimalist space, was and is interesting.

I unfortunately yet again didn't finish this game in time, also because I got a bit lost in the first part of it, the environmental stuff, and because I hadn't that much time in this December anyways. The majority of its mechanics was emplemented during just one night. As of December 22nd, the actual game part is still missing, and the toy part could certainly be improved, the snow particles for example. But at least the actual environments are finished. I will add the rest of it in the future. I usually do not do this, but here credits are provided in a seperate txt file, because I was/am quite in a hurry at time of writing. Also, the file size is quite big and I didn't have time for these optimizations before my personal deadline, I had to compress it heavier into a 7z-file for now.  And this file is still too big for itch.io, therefore I have to share it via Google Drive, but I will add proper game files in a couple of days.

Publishing sth sparks a little serotonin, and it is prove that one once existed.

❄️ May the snow particles not roast your computer. ❄️