On the Darkening Green

A visual novel fairytale with horror elements where you play as Harper, a traveler navigating a strange forest with your companion, Glen.

This game was created for Utah Indie Game Jam 2017 in 48 hours, following the theme “Pacifist”.

We used Renpy as our base engine and the game is completely playable, working in three acts with randomized, modular scenes that can reflect choices made in previous interactions. As of now, the story can play out in over 200 different ways, with eight separate endings—and with the current structure of the game, we could easily add to this. Aside from some UI elements, all of the art assets were painted by us during the game jam, which allowed for a lot of control with art direction.

The theme “Pacifist” inspired us to examine consequence and morality. Your choices in the game influence your stats- which ultimately define the style of your ending. Working on a set of axes, the game measures your behavior along the spectrums of violence versus pacifism and apathy versus empathy.  We wanted to explore a grey zone of morality and none of these traits are written as completely good or bad, but all give a variety of consequences that you might not foresee.

We hope you enjoy creating your own dark fairytale as much as we enjoyed working on it.

Alec Garibay @dream_tempo

Tasha Chopine @tashachopine

Light Bates @LightDiscordant

Sam Wilson @TopHatting

Suzee Goodman @nobleseascallop