Alzheimer's
Uppsala University 1 2 weeks
A wordless 30-second microgame about an amnesiac trying to reconstruct his daughter's face as it slips from memory.
Built for Game Design 1 at Uppsala University, where our team had to tell a single short story by making one microgame per story beat, each built individually under a 30-second, no-dialogue limit. This was my beat. I started from Mario Party’s face-reassembling minigame and reframed it as memory loss.
The player rebuilds the old man’s memory of his daughter’s face from floating features, and time fights the effort: each calendar page crumples into a paper ball and flies at her face, jumbling the features further with every hit. It builds faster than the player can fix it, until the screen overwhelms them and her face comes apart for good. The player is meant to lose her, and losing her is the old man’s memory decaying.
Two weeks forced two cuts. The paper balls were a compromise: the pages were meant to fold into origami bats that drained the color from her face as it struck. And reconstruction mistakes were meant to bleed back onto the old man himself, his own face coming apart as hers did, so forgetting her also meant losing himself.