Uncovering the roots - GGJ 2023

I participated in the Global/Finnish Game Jam 2023 in a team of two to create a short narrative game about ancestry research in Finland. The jam theme was "Roots", so we went with "searching for your roots" interpretation. All of the art was done by me, code done by my partner Bach and we collaborated on the story and game design decisions. You can try this short game (5-10min playtime) on the GGJ website, there are web and Windows versions: https://globalgamejam.org/2023/games/project-mystery-3
Game jams are a nice opportunity to experience game development in its most distilled form. With every minute counting you're looking for efficient approaches to have a finished result even in such a short time as 2 days. In our case, I limited the colours and only worked with few values, and only in the end injected some colour to support the storytelling aspects - the player goes from looking through old documents to finally visiting their ancestor's grave in the present, modern world. This also proved to be a nice change of pace compared to a larger, slower going project I'm working on.