'Vignettes: The Dream City' started as an entry to LSDJAM 2023, but quickly ballooned into something I wanted to release commercially on Steam. The goal of LSDJAM is to make games based on dreams, and a lot of my dreams tend to involve just walking around and exploring lonely, mysterious spaces that are commonly mashups of places I'm familiar with in real life. I wanted to see if I could replicate that experience of that kind of unguided exploration in a game.
Something I'm interested in is how game design has trended towards making games appealing to a very broad range of people, by adding a lot of tutorialisation and onboarding, and making the game world generally quite hospitable to the player. When I started making Vignettes I was playing things like 'Fear & Hunger' and 'King's Field', and of course thinking about 'LSD: Dream Emulator' - all games which kind of just throw the player into a sometimes inhospitable world and let them figure things out by themselves. I love that.
I didn't want to make a game for a really broad range of people, I wanted to make Vignettes for a small group of weirdo freaks that would love it. I'm trying to make something where the player has to figure out almost everything for themselves, including basic game mechanics like combat and the best way to navigate through the spaces. I think a dream world is the perfect place to embody concepts like that, as when you dream you have no idea what the hell is happening, but you can figure it out through some kind of weird dream logic.
