Letters from the Home Front

Letters from the Home Front is a project that was created during the 2019 Global Game Jam. We had 48 hours to concept, prototype, and create a game based off of this years theme, Home. 

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Our team consisted of 5 former students and Alumni of The Art Institute of Portland. During brainstorming we decided to come up with ideas that fit the theme but were less obvious than what first comes to mind when you think about home. This is how we came up with the idea of a game revolving around carrier pigeons, the pigeons that are born and bread in specific places so that when you release them from elsewhere, they will return "home". 

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To add a story element to our game, we decided that we should be able to read these letters, and create a situation in which the letters that we read all relate back to each other in some way. We decided to tell the story of a young soldier through his family, friends, and commanding officers. 

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Though the game is far from polished, I believe that we did very well for just 48 hours and that the story is compelling and interesting. Throughout this process I was responsible for writing all the letters that came from the mother, sister, and girlfriend. I created all of the letter assets in Photoshop through image manipulation and found all the fonts as well. I also created the map that you fly over in the game. 

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The stamps on the letters were created by Blake, all of the military style letters, and letters sent from soldiers were written by Thea, the pigeon animation was also done by Thea, all of the programming was done by Dasha and Tri. All five of us worked on the setting for the game and story. This was tons of fun to work on, and I hope to do many more game jams in the future.