Welcome to What We Mend

If you’re reading this, then my new game prototype: What We Mend has been released!

This was a spontaneous project I started in my spare time at the beginning of the year. The goal: to see if I could make a puzzle game with a story that complemented the puzzle mechanics. The result of that is this little vertical slice containing a bit of story, and a few puzzles. Should be enough to entertain for around 15 minutes I hope. I don’t know if I’ll have time to return and make it into a full game, but I learned a lot making it and would like to talk a little bit about that process.

If you aren’t interest in my rambling - go play it! It’s a free prototype that should take around 15 minutes to play. Play it on desktop though, I couldn’t find the time to add mobile controls, this was made in my spare time after all.

For those still here: this concept was inspired by Mediatonic’s Murder By Numbers - which is part Visual Novel, and part Picross. In that one the metaphor is that images of objects are unscrambled by a little robot companion, and picross puzzles are like resolving an image from bits of information.

I decided that a nice puzzle type I’d not seen much in games was Tangrams - taking tiles, a given shape, and then trying to arrange the tiles within that shape. Seemed like an easy enough thing for a small solo project! But what kind of story does a tangram tell? I wrote out a lot of verbs: repair, building, bricklaying, tesselating, stacking, covering, darning etc. Ultimately, the themes that seemed easiest to write about were those of building, mending and maintenance.

So that’s what we have here. A story of a sculptor on a space station, around the time that the space habitat gets forcibly cut off from earth. Without the easy solution buying new things when objects break, the people of the habitat suddenly have to start repairing and repurposing what they have. So our sculptor runs out of materials and must move from building to wandering around and helping people repair things, and thinking about the questions that repair, maintenance and built-in obsolescence raise. Or that would be the story if it was complete!

As it stands, we have the introduction, some art, some UI, and enough puzzles and text to make it feel like a short demo for a game. Forcing myself to just make something, and get it to the point where I realise “I could just make a whole game out of this” was the goal, and I’m happy to say I achieved it. Obviously there would be further challenges (better defining a core narrative, more UI tweaks, alternate control schemes, making all that art), but that’s what I’ll take to the next project. Anyway, it may be a bit janky or have some strange ideas, but that’s a personal project for you. I hope you enjoy.

• Alex