https://repacker.itch.io/neigh
Neigh!
Earth has gone to shit. With climate change causing catastrophic damage to the global food-supply, humanity has decided to seek refuge amongst the planets of other sentient beings across the galaxy. In the U.S., NEIGH, or the Nationwide Evacuation to Intergalactic Habitable Sanctuaries program, leads multiple evacuation missions for U.S. citizens. Only humans and other sentient life-forms are allowed on board, all other animal genomes are transported for reconstruction on landing. Consequently, Chevy, a farmer from El Paso, Texas, must figure out what to do with his best friend and horse, Nova. Abandoning Nova is not an option. With his trusty flash-freezer and tears in his eyes, Chevy freezes Nova whole, sells all of his meat except for his head, and with the money, constructs an alien-powered cryochamber in his barn for what remains of his best friend, hoping to return to Earth once NEIGH deems it re-inhabitable in order to reconstruct the rest of Nova’s body. 3000 years after the NEIGH missions, Chevy is nowhere to be found, and Nova’s cryo-chamber leaks onto a John Deere android mow-bot.
In Neigh! you play as Nova, 80% android, 20% horse? 50/50? 10/90? Who knows! In search of Chevy and some apples, explore what remains of the galaxy after humans grazed on whatever parts of it they could leech onto and take pictures with whoever you find to document your lonely journey.
Neigh! is a 2D point-n-click adventure game made with Godot.
Ideation/Versions/Iteration:
The idea for Neigh did not come easy. In fact, I started working on this Idea Monday of the week P2 was due. My first idea was made in-class when we were introduced to IF games, the story took place on a world where unhoused and unemployed individuals were violently relocated to planets across the galaxy and separated from the work force. I didn’t feel passionate about or connected to this idea whatsoever, and knew i wanted to switch.
My next idea came many, many days later. I aimed to create a video-game adaptation of the film Melancholia by Lars Von Trier, a film about depression in which a planet named Melancholia is about to collide with and destroy Earth. It felt fitting for an IF game due to the various different branches the main character takes in the film to try to distract herself from her wedding and enjoy her last few days on Earth (she is supernaturally gifted with the knowledge of Earth’s future a week before the collision). This idea fell through because adaptations are difficult, and figuring out what to keep/change/add felt even more difficult than coming up with my own idea.
So I looked onward and decided to make a futuristic game loosely based on the life of Pyotr Kropotkin, an anarchist writer nicknamed “the anarchist prince” due to being born into Russian nobility and getting exiled for his anarchist beliefs and support of the serfs. Since serfs were commonly thought of and described as cattle during Russian serfdom, I wanted the characters to be cyborg horses. Turns out that successfully incorporating intimate details of a person’s life that you gather from multiple autobiographies of that person into a game is extremely difficult, and so this idea met its end.
Finally, i landed on the idea for Neigh! after combining the cyborg horses from my third idea with one of the ideas for a game I would like to make in the future where you play as an emo cat with a camera looking for its owner across the galaxy.
For each of my previous ideas, I’d fully crafted the opening scenes and dialogues between characters. Drawing took up a huge portion of my time for each of these, so i decided to just focus on fleshing out the barn room for Neigh! as much as i could. It was my last of three attempts at crafting the opening scene of a point-n-click adventure game. I wanted the barn scene to make players care about Nova, the lonely journey he is about to embark on, as well as Chevy and Nova’s unyielding bond.
Coding and learning about Godot also took a large amount of time: learning GDScript, discovering how nodes work, fixing bugs and bridging the gap between vision and product. Although i absolutely loved working on this project, I did feel limited by my artistic choices, making 2D isometric games is very hard due to sprite-sorting, elevation, and the rest of the things one has to do to make it feel 3D. I wish i had gotten to code and explore the engine more, and that i hadn’t used an in-development plugin for Godot for my first ever digital game. Having to figure out how Popochiu organized itself was tedious and very time-consuming, and I found it difficult to explore outside of its bounds.
Playtesting:
My playtests were extremely informal. If a roommate or a friend caught me working on the game, they would give feedback on my art, my walking animations, my dialogue, etc. The game’s playtime is extremely small and so if they ever did take my mouse and try to play it was never for long enough to call their experience a playtest.
Reflection:
Neigh! was an amazing learning experience and a story I’d love to develop in the future. For the sake of my own learning, next time I would not use an engine at all and instead use something more bare-bones like Bevy or LOVE2D so I could hopefully feel more in-tune with my code.
Hi Jose! I’m one of your peer reviewers so I’m leaving my comments here 🙂
What values you see in the game, and how they are reflected in the choices made by the game designer?
This game’s values are loyalty, companionship, and exploration– even in a world that humans have mostly destroyed. As Nova, the part horse part android, you get to reminisce on times with your owner Chevy and (with future iterations) embark on a journey to find him somewhere in the galaxy. We learn that Chevy saved Nova from death, even if it was questionable, and created a space where Nova would be safe. The ability to interact with a holographic version of Chevy and look at old pictures of the two characters strengthens this connection and the associated values.
How well did the game get you to care about the given topic or cause? Justify.
I feel like it is a bit difficult to care about the state of the world when all that I can see of it is a barn; however, I think the emotional connection to Chevy was well-designed, and would be excited to see that develop more as the MC learns about the new state of the galaxy. Of the story that exists, I think it’s very effective at setting up the destroyed world the character’s live in and the relationships between them.
How well did the game’s use of the medium fit the story? Justify.
The art style fits well with the point-and-click format and it seems like the game will be about traveling across space, so using point-and-click is far more effective than using Twine for the story. I could also see the story becoming overly complex for Inform, so I think Godot was a great choice.
Did it have choices that were interesting and consequential to you? (Did any make you really stop and think?) Why?
There were not really any choices to make in this stage of the game, so the only one would be whether to flip the light switch first or pop head out of the cryo chamber first. It was fun to walk around and explore artifacts, though, like that specs for our cyborg horse MC.
At least 1 thing you appreciated or thought was awesome.
Your art is fantastic, the cryo chamber is so so cool (seriously, the wires!!) and I loved the aspect of setting up your player character by giving them their actual head. I also liked that Chevy had an accent (but be careful to make sure what he’s saying is clear or repeatable if you work on the game further)
At least 1 thing you think they could improve on, if they were to turn it into their P4 project.
One minor thing I would change is having only the light switch highlighted at the beginning of the barn scene. It’s not a huge deal, but I think the head-dropping animation is cool and I didn’t get to see it on my first play since I clicked the cryo chamber first. Other than that, I would love to see the final adventure and make choices that would bring the MC closer to Chevy!