Honour: remembering our ancestors
Striving to depict cultural similarities and differences in burial traditions between Italy and Hong Kong with an interactive illustration.
Make a game that honors, remembers, or pays tribute to someone that you knew that is gone. Often, game jams are about mechanics, themes, restrictions. The challenge in this jam is about having the courage to get personal, and through the act of creation, attempting to get closer to something real and meaningful.
Remember the Dead game jam
Around Halloween, spooky game jams abound, but this one in particular caught my eye with it’s open-ended and non-traditional prompt. I’ve always held my Italian-American ancestry in high esteem, so even with what limited free time I had, I joined the jam.
Who to honour, how to honour
Two directions immediately sprung to mind. The first could take influence from my great-uncle Linwood Rohrbach, a man like a grandfather to me. Having learned fluent German while living in Berlin in the 50s, he sparked my interest in the language and inspired me to study abroad. Unfortunately, he passed in 2011, too early to see me realise my exchange year in Switzerland.
The second direction would be a more general exploration of my Italian ancestry and how the Amici family came to settle in Pennsylvania from Gorga. Great-grandfather Louis (Luigi) Amici arrived in the US as a child around 1900. Though he and his wife spoke Italian with the family, the language eventually fell from use due to WW2-era stigmas. Both he and his wife died in the mid nineties, leaving me with only photos and vague memories of them and their house. Fast-forward to 2015, when I traveled to Gorga and became acquainted with our family who remained in Italy, eventually visiting the local cemetery to help build our genealogical record.
Idea generation
Tour Planner
Uncle Lin used to plan and lead tours through Europe. My first international trip was in 2008 when I went along with one of his final groups. Could I make an Oregon Trail-esque story about this experience?Yardwork
Prior to their house being sold, I worked with Uncle Lin to clean up the wide backyard and slate-paved patio. How about a free-form game allowing the player to rearrange stones, plants, and dirt as a zen-esque garden simulation?House Memories
Many houses from my childhood exist now only in my memories. Would it be possible to illustrate a home and use hotspots to trigger memories? (similar idea to another submitted game!)Il Cimetario
Exploring the cemetary in Gorga on my first trip to my relatives in Italy was a very sombre and interesting experience. A game would have the potential to explore the entire family tree and phase between Italy and the US.
Decision Time
With little time remaining to make something, anything for the jam, I once again realised I spent too much time thinking and not enough time making. Reviewing my ideas, I decided to adapt the idea of exploring a cemetery while also looking at the difference between traditions followed in Italy versus those in my current location of Hong Kong.
The day before the jam closed, I sat down with a local co-worker at lunch to chat about Chinese funerary traditions. Due to lack of space, many locals are cremated and stored in ossuaries. On certain holidays, families arrive to clean graves and pay respect by setting out a feast of food and alcohol to consume with the dead. Incense and paper replicas of worldly items are burned to accompany the dead in the afterlife. This contrasts with the more western tradition of flat, open cemeteries. In Gorga, I noticed most graves are above ground, with families sometimes sharing a single, tall tomb.
Illustrating the scenes
With the deadline looming, I had only a night to put together a scene each from Hong Kong and Italy. While I generally stuck to my standard vector style, I introduced an element of uniqueness in that I forwent any curves in favour of straight lines and angles.
For interactivity’s sake, I first drew a monochrome scene, then picked out and coloured a few important elements which could then be laid over the original scene at the click of a button, showing how the different cultures each honour their dead.
Coding the interactivity
As with most things I code, this one’s not pretty, but it works. I had just a couple of hours before submission, but what needed to be done was quite simple. I used Skeleton.css as my super-unnecessary boilerplate and imported JQuery too, just for good measure.
In an attempt at responsiveness, I encased each pair of illustrations within a vertical flex container, both of which were then placed in another, horizontal container. justify-content: flex-start meant that all I needed to do was write some Javascript to toggle the display of each pair upon clicking the button above and the two would seemingly swap out.
Check it out here: amicia.github.io/portfolio/Honour
My (first ever!) jam entry: itch.io/jam/remember-the-dead/rate/190233
Post-mortem⚱
Overall, I found it much harder to make something personal than I originally imagined. I got so caught up thinking about game mechanics and the play experience that I lost sight of my own stories. Because they aren’t tragic or filled with conflict, I kept worrying that anything I present would be too boring for the player. Ironically, such slice-of-life games are often the games I enjoy the most. I think I need to look more critically at how some of my favourite games manage to make the mundane interesting…
These articles document monthly projects I am doing to expand my knowledge across the wide range of disciplines that can be loosely associated with ‘design’. Previous works here: aja5174.cias.rit.edu & amicidesigns.tumblr.com
