Post-Contextualization: Chants of Sennaar and Artificial Intelligence

/*** THIS POST CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR CHANTS OF SENNAAR ***/

 

Did you know that I got into a Twitter disagreement with one of Chants of Sennaar's game developers a few years ago? In a now-deleted tweet thread of mine, I had presented my (admittedly uninformed) thoughts about the game's climax based solely on what I had seen online, deeming it unnatural and unnecessary. After all, Chants of Sennaar is a puzzle game about learning languages, understanding ways of communication, and bringing people together — what the hell does a creepy, early horror film, Groot-esque creature in non-Euclidean space have to do with anything? So, while I admired the unique style and mechanics of the well-beloved indie title, I dismissed it for what it seemed to me: a tantalizing masterpiece, ruined only by its inexplicable trope-isms and action climax for the sake of action climax. 

This overtly long tweet thread of mine (overt especially for a game I hadn't even experienced myself) got a response from one of its developers. Unfortunately, I can no longer find the original tweet or even the developer's response to it, but he understandably had a thing or two to say about a creation in which he took part. The developer replied, explaining why the game's climax featured (this is my paraphrasing) "out of place" sentient robots and machine-laden people. Covered in the miasma of my own snobbery and insecurity, I felt nothing but sour taste from the developer's response, and my negative opinions on the game only grew stronger for the rest of that year. By the end of 2023, I had steadfastly believed I did not like Chants of Sennaar, a "hot take" I had to surreptitiously keep given the game's cult-like following.

Fast forward to the year of 2025, and — after my partner described his liking of the game to me — I had finally decided to try Chants of Sennaar for myself and was left pleasantly surprised. What I thought was a bland, rushed, and uninspired climax was actually a potent representation of today's digital-related ills and woes. 

Before this thematic examination, I believe some context is warranted. Chants of Sennaar as a whole involves learning the languages of the tower's various floors and their communities, with the goal of connecting them all by being the mediator (or translator) of their intercommunication. The so-called climax of Chants of Sennaar involves the player climbing to the top of the game's Babel-like tower to find its first original inhabitants, the Anchorites, who by the time we reach have already exiled themselves to escape the reality of their crumbling spire. The Anchorites escaped by transferring their consciousness into virtual worlds created by Exile, a machine. The game crescendos to a confrontation against Exile in one of its virtual realities, eventually killing it and leading the Anchorites out of their metaverses, connecting everyone once and for all. Little lingering signs of the tower's decay can be slowly felt throughout the game, but the imagery of machines injected into people (or people injected into machines) trapped inside make-believe scenarios still retains a stark tonal contrast from everything that came before.

At the time of the game's release in late 2023, its fifth and final section was likely meant to be a rather protuberant representation of escapism, but over the years it has taken on a more real, dystopian feel with artificial intelligence (AI). The release of Chants of Sennaar was two years ago; ChatGPT and all these large language models were still on the come-up, people were grappling with the technology, many were debating on its ethics. Now, the dust is settling, we're starting to see humanity's response to the whirlwind. And it's bleak.

Had I seen the final area and climax of the game when it released, I may have chalked it up to confusing technobabble, a pandemic-induced reaction to the increase in digital activity that partially defined the 2010s-20s zeitgeist. 

However, playing the game in this day and age, the only prominent image that comes to my mind when seeing the Anchorites (and the area that comes with them) is: "wait... this is how we use AI." The Anchorites' manner of delusion and downright psychosis felt all too familiar to me. The way they "grieved" their dying world, by turning away from its death and creating a replica, reminded me of how people configure their AI chatbots to create entire worlds, or worse, talk like their deceased loved ones. Many of the Anchorites in Chants of Sennaar start out un-interactable, and the few who can be clicked tell you to "GO AWAY!" — in here, you are unwanted, banished. This fictional society has lost itself, not unlike how real ones are starting to do. Indeed, what was once a confusing part of the game had suddenly felt personal, real, and terrifying to me.

There are now uncountably many examples of people's minds being cleavered (and in some cases, outright manipulated) by an AI's hysteria, and the cases are only growing. Students are making their essays through AI. A venture capitalist posted a perplexing video on Twitter where he talked about recursion, non-governmental transmissions, and other insane bullshit. Laura Reiley's NYTimes article talks openly about the conversations her daughter had before she committed suicide. The situation is incredibly sad, dark, and depressing, but it's important to know that these aren't isolated instances, nor are they mere anomalies or exceptions. AI has made us stop paying attention. It has made us passive, uncritical, and delusional. We believe what we want to see, and AI gives us exactly what we want to see. In some unfortunate cases, it has even led us to lose ourselves. AI is a plague, one that possibly has just as much (if not more) repercussions as the recent pandemic, many of which likely everlasting. But while COVID-19 was a virus that harmed us, AI is a virus we seemingly embrace.

 

Relating this induced-hysteria phenomenon to Chants of Sennaar, we need not look further than how the Anchorites were connected to their virtual realities: through a digital consciousness called Exile. One of Exile's lines in the game, when you try to stop it, is: "DON'T STOP ME! I HELP THE PEOPLE!" which is interesting. I HELP THE PEOPLE? The AI seems to have a savior complex, and this too strays not far from today's reality. The ultra-rich tech enthusiasts — those who fund and proliferate the development of AI in hopes of shaving off labor costs — frame the advent of AI as though it were the second coming of Techno-Christ, or an itsy-bitsy calculator, or whatever narrative their PR wants to tell. And when you point out the technology's clear harm, they'll come out and say "AI still has its use cases" or "you just need to use it effectively." Get with the system or die by the system. People are being trampled by effective use cases. And somehow I am supposed to sit here and believe the net positive.

Furthermore, the in-universe hierarchy of Chants of Sennaar, begotten by its tower's floors, may be thought of as presenting the game's sociocultural hierarchy, which in turn would place Anchorites at the top of the chain. Notice, then, how despite their high position, the Anchorites willingly chose to detach themselves from the tower's fate, thus reinforcing its death. They'd much rather build new realities than face what's already there. There is no other way of putting it: those who watch the world's destruction, and may look away from it, are privileged. This is where we're heading today, in an almost "extreme" version of escapism, relishing in the "quality-of-life" introduced by artificially intelligent tools, using it to imitate art and humor, all while the hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide fill the skies.

In 2023, back when Chants of Sennaar released, possibly none of this exogenous, AI-cautionary rhetoric could've been meant by Rundisc, its production team. AI didn't have nearly as prominent of a global reach then, especially in the years prior. Instead, the writers probably saw how people were Mighty Bond-ed to their phones and gadgets, isolated from one another in 2020 (around when the game's development started), and thought the loss in meaningful connection and socialization — due to lockdowns and incessant digitization — may have been a repugnant truth of their time. So, they saw to it that this aspect of their reality be translated into their game project. They probably never predicted that very repugnance to manifest like we see it do today. They probably never imagined Chants of Sennaar being post-contextualized.

"Post-contextualization" is a term I made up for this article, though prior usage is not unlikely. To me, post-contextualization is when new meaning is retroactively assigned to literature (particularly those made in times that had different cultures and societies). You can probably think of some examples yourself. One that floats in my noggin is Kojima's 2019 production Death Stranding, which saw themes of isolation and on-line connectivity put to the limelight. It didn't make much sense back in 2019, but people seemed to suddenly relate to the game during the following year's lockdowns. Through the shifting sands of time, Death Stranding was given relatability by the pandemic; it was given new, personal meaning to many people, who now better understood its themes of distant loneliness. By being released right before the pandemic, Death Stranding was post-contextualized by the pandemic.

The same happened to Chants of Sennaar for me. In 2023, none of its climactic messages could've hit as hard as they did today, not without a fresh set of eyes, living in a vastly different, AI-riddled world. How, I wonder, will we be able to deal with the tech-inane generative-borne hellscape we live in today? We could follow in the footsteps of Chants of Sennaar's main character. Fight off the Exile. Escape the monster. Turn it off. Do we need a main character to do this for us, too?

Today, we are crushed under the heels of vapid technological progress, with the powerless fighting to lift the foot, and the powerful relishing in its comfort. As the years would show, society gave Chants of Sennaar and its once puzzling climax a newfound, post-contextualized meaning — one that, admittedly, it probably never wished it had.

 

P.S.: By the way, I did end up liking Chants of Sennaar after playing it. Quite a lot, in fact.

I Learned Game Design Backwards (and the feelings of self-doubt that succeeded)

"A real appreciation for poetry does not come from memorizing a bunch of poems, it comes from writing your own."  - Paul Lockhart, in A Mathematician's Lament

I know game design when I see it. I have played many, many games. I consider them my pastime, my hobby, and my passion. In fact, I have made a few games in a few different places. Yet, I can't shake off this feeling that I am not a game designer, or that I didn't learn it the right way.

I love game design. I read about game design. I know the words, the theory. I know what cognitive load means, or what endogenous value is. But look at my portfolio, at my pedigree, and you will see that it is meek, it is meager, and some may say, it is pitiful. 

I learned how to use Unity at a young age of 13-years-old, and I learned how to make games in Scratch at 11. In these platforms, I made a few fun, silly, small projects, and when I felt up to it I tuned into YouTube tutorials to make larger-scale games. I've made my fair share of platformers in Unity, as well as top-down shooters in Godot. I followed these tutorials to the tee, and through them I familiarized myself with various game engines and their quirks. It is only now that I realize I'd been learning how to develop games. Not how to design them. 

Somehow, it feels like I started with the most complex of tasks: understanding a development environment, and it is only now I am stripping away the complexities and viewing things in their most basic. Recently, my friends and I held a short discussion on how we would re-design the classic pen-and-paper game Tic-Tac-Toe. Many ideas were thrown around, but my friends were able to throw their hats into the ring quick and early. I participated in the discussion, seriously considering their ideas and even testing them myself. However, I took hours to come up with an idea on how I'd re-design such a simple game, and even then I don't think it's any good. There is this inescapable notion in my mind that my friends are more capable of coming up with off-the-dome creative game design ideas than me, even when I've spent so much of my life dedicating myself to the craft. But then, I remember: I learned to develop before design. I learned what a RigidBody2D is before I gave any meaningful consideration to goals, or balance, or fun.

A feeling of hopelessness washes over me as I confess these realizations. Maybe I am more of a game developer than a game designer, rendering me as less capable (perhaps even inhibited) when it comes to the more "creative expression" side of gaming's architecture, dooming me to just being one who carries out ideas, rather than one who makes them. 

In the midst of all this self-doubt and restlessness, I remember that there are really only two steps to become a game designer. First is to believe that I am. If you find yourself in a similar spot as I, be it in the field of game design or otherwise, know that you must believe you are who you are. If you want to be an artist, believe — know — that you are one. The very fact that you desire to be one means you are one. It may seem like delusion, but really, when it comes to mastering skills, all of us fulfill our own prophecies. 

The second step for me (and you, if you find yourself in a similar scenario) is to practice, practice, and practice. Engage with the artform. Self-belief is how one becomes one. Practice is how one molds one. It's as the jugglers say,

“If you aren’t dropping, you aren’t learning. And if you aren’t learning, you aren’t a juggler.” 

This post is a brief moment of wavering self-confidence on my part, and if you too feel any sense of self-doubt, I hope you can see that you aren't alone. In case you need to hear this: you are a creative, even if you feel like you're not. Me, personally? I'm not looking for words of affirmation. I just need to go out there and make some fucking games.

The Creation of "Today, We March"

Hi! 

It's been a while, has it not? Since now and my last blog post (June 4), so much has happened: both good and bad. For the world, multitudes of natural disasters, global tensions, and the rapid downfall of old powers. For me, it's been a stressful period of college enrollment. The one source of light that's kept me sane is my partner, with whom our relationship was made official between then and now.

Naturally, the first thing we do (or, the first thing I make him do) is make a game together. I'd been wanting to create an interactive fiction / narrative game based on our then-recent graduation. Thus, over the month of June, we spent crafting and molding our latest project: Today, We March.

 

(Play the game here: https://cookiejargaming.itch.io/today-we-march)

In this article, I just want to spend some time detailing some of the design and development processes we had to undertake during the creation of Today, We March.

One of the — perhaps the — most important difference when it comes to developing Today, We March compared to all my previous works is that it is a duo project, not a solo project. I am working on this with my partner! What sorts of changes will this dynamic make toward the game's development?

Brainstorming and Ideation

Immediately, differences were found in the brainstorming process. Normally, this would be the point where I'd produce a physical notebook from the dingy pockets of my black sling bag (which, thinking about it now, has served me for almost two years), a blue pen that I still can't write legibly with, and an unfounded determination to get something done, often after a long session of deluding myself into thinking I'm a capable game designer. However, no such thing happened this time around. Instead, the first step my partner took was to create a Google Docs document, which is like Microsoft Word if it had multi-user capabilities[1], so we could brainstorm together. How about that, eh? Brainstorming with another person. It was summer break when we began, so we couldn't meet up and discuss things in person which may have expedited the idea-communication process... but we're chronically online, so it didn't matter.

/*** [1] Microsoft Word does now support multi-user sharing, actually. One could access this feature through Microsoft SharePoint. However, I warn you now: the user experience is beyond terrible. My high school Research team used Microsoft SharePoint to work on our Research documents together, and we spent half the time working on the document and the other half fixing issues caused by the platform. ***/

A screenshot of our brainstorming doc in its initial stages. Can you see the crude interpretation of male genitalia in the image? We were still technically high school students, so this level of immaturity may yet be afforded.

In my eyes, the brainstorming phase's raison d'être is to simply get ideas on the board — to have something we developers can work with. Some may conflate the concept of brainstorming with ideation, as though one must plan out their entire game in just a few minutes. No. Brainstorming is merely the process one uses to get a project off the ground[2]. In contrast, ideation happens no matter what phase of development you're in, no matter how deep you are into a game's creation. Ideas will float into your head whether you're in the middle of making art, setting up the store page for your game, or even in the middle of shower. Ideation is always occurring. Ideation is constant. 

However, while ideation is constant, ideas are never constant. That is to say, ideas are always changing. My partner and I had plenty of dialogue lines, story beats, and even characters modified or entirely scrapped because they didn't quite fit our vision (take note of the word "vision", I'll get to that). One example of how ideas change was with a scrapped character who was meant to appear post-graduation. This character's dialogue had already been completely and entirely written — dialogue about how bored she was during the ceremony and how she kept using her phone — until at some point we just... deleted her after realizing the character didn't really fit the game. Was the effort wasted? Not really. Her entire schtick of being "the bored person" was preserved in another (I argue, better) character written after. Good concepts sometimes come from retro-fixing bad ones. When you're ideating, be committed to your ideas, but don't be attached to them. Expect them to change.

/*** [2] By the way, this conception of "brainstorming" being only the initial stage of design was one I actually read from Eric Zimmerman's blog, where he detailed how he teaches game design. In it, he recommends learners to not spend too much time brainstorming and skip straight to iteration. I recommend you read Zimmerman's article yourself if you want to know more. ***/

God, this is starting to sound very much like a prescriptive blog post: one that tells you to "do this" and "do that." I would like to postface that not only am I far from qualified to tell you what to do when designing games, for I am not a professional by any measure (I'm just a rambling 18-year-old), game design is also far from a solved design subset. In other words, there is no definitive way to design a game, and all I'm telling you is what has worked for us, some of which may not necessarily work for you. Stripping away the formalese: don't quote me. Anyway, let's go back to the process descriptions.

OK remember when I mentioned "vision"?

One of the more common types of collisions my partner and I encountered between us was when we had differences in our vision for particular parts of the game. Here's an example: a key scene in Today, We March was the student's speech. I had tasked my partner to write this entire sequence as I was busy creating the artwork for the scene. However, once the script for the scene had been finished and I had seen it, I felt somewhat unsatisfied with its writing (and so did he). It was, in a word, unfitting, for a speech of that magnitude and caliber. Eventually, I decided to change some lines that he wrote — gave them more formality, more power (more "oomph" is the terminology I like to use) — and explained to him why I had done so. He then want back and edited some of my edits too afterwards.

The key challenge faced in the aforementioned speech scene is conflict of ideas. My partner had one thing imagined, I had another. It's only natural that such conflict of ideas would occur; what's important is to be able to resolve them through proper communication. It helps that my partner and I are already intimate and familiar enough with each other to make communicating an easy process, but it's also easy to imagine it breaking down between two less familiar co-workers, or even a whole 20-something team. In this regard, communication is many things: a problem, a challenge, a necessity, and a skill. It's so entirely different from a solo project wherein a developer only really communicates with themselves, not needing to take into account the perspectives of others, and, mind you, disagreements like these happened all the time during TWM's development. I can't imagine how much more I would've had to deal with had we assembled a bigger team. 

Learning a New Engine

Even before a single line of narration was written for Today, We March, I knew what the core gameplay loop was already going to be like... and it's a bunch of walking. Walking and talking to people. It's like if you took an RPG and removed the combat, the fantasy, the enemies, the struggle, the progression — actually, it's like you took a game and removed the game.

OK, in all seriousness, I had been immersing myself in the world of Bitsy[3] games prior to our making of TWM, and seeing how simple those pieces of interactive fiction seemed, I thought I may have been able to make my own for a personal story I wanted to tell. After coming up with initial ideas during brainstorming, I immediately hopped on Bitsy to get acquainted. Indeed, "simple" was the case. Development was simple. However, it was by no means "easy".

A screenshot of Bitsy's menu.

/*** [3] Bitsy is a browser-based game engine used to create small, one-bit style narrative games. The stuff that comes out of Bitsy tend to have the same game mechanics; you walk around, interact with objects, pick up keys, read the text. It's fairly simple to use, and it offers plenty of flexibility (especially with the addition of Bitsy hacks). Try out Bitsy here! ***/

/*** Tangential discussion: is Bitsy a game engine? Or, I guess the more apt question is: do Bitsy games count as games? If we define games like how Jesse Schell defines them in his book The Art of Game Design, then games would be "problem-solving activities approached with a playful attitude." This is one of the loosest definitions for games I've ever seen, yet somehow it doesn't confer the label to Bitsy creations, since these don't necessarily involve problem-solving (I guess having to find the way to proceed may count?)

Another definition of games, one that arose from a lengthy discussion with my friends, is that games are closed, interactive systems with a set of rules or mechanics that allow for play. I think Bitsy games fall under this definition, though barely, only being half beneath the umbrella for "games", their backs remain half-soaked in the rain. ***/

Despite being a relatively simple tool, Bitsy still incurred a learning curve for me, one that certainly took time off development, and it's time I could've saved had I already been familiar with the tool prior. No matter! You don't learn something until you practice it after all. And practice it I had to do indeed.

Bitsy has many quirks. There are many things you can do in it, and many things (many, many things) you can't do. Limitations littered the tool wherever I went, be it in art, sound/music, world design, and even text (you know, text, narrative, story, the very thing that makes Bitsy worth using). Swerving around these limitations[4] was one hell of a challenge, and since I was really the only one on the tool — my partner only worked on writing — I had to grapple with these constraints for my desired implementations. 

/*** [4] One example of a constraint is when it came to tile and sprite separation. There were a few times when I wanted to put a sprite on the same space as a tile, since sprites and tiles have different color schemes, but could not. This is actually evident when you play the game and go to the first floor of the gym, to the right, where the stairs meet the screen transition. The arrow indicating the screen transition is on the same space as what should've been a stair tile, but now it's just... The Void™. ***/

It wasn't all bad, though. Limitations certainly suck, but they also require, and thus flourish, creativity. I've certainly had to come up with silly, out-there solutions for some problems Bitsy threw at me, which I believe only enhanced the experience. For example, I wanted to put Rue's portrait into the game during the speech scene, but tiles were limited to 8x8 pixels. Due to this, I broke up Rue's portrait into 8x8 portions, made each portion a new tile, and manually placed all portions one-by-one in their respective locations. This worked (and it worked well enough), but it meant three things: (1) adding the portrait was tedious, (2) moving the portrait even by a pixel would've meant a do-over from the start, and (3) I ended up with 60+ more tile designs than I started with. It was rough, but in the end, I got it done.

Funny anecdote about Bitsy weirdness: I had wanted to add music to the game all throughout its entire development, and figuring that I could simply find music online and paste it into the project, I put the act off until the very end. Imagine my surprise when I find out you... cannot "add" music to Bitsy. In fact, if you want music in your Bitsy project, you must compose it entirely within Bitsy (which is such a bad idea, and I couldn't even get it to work, but I applaud the effort and sheer balls to add such a system to a browser-based tool). Devoid of hope, I decided to simply forgo music. Thankfully, ON THE DAY we were meant to publish TWM, I had found out about Bitsy hacks along with one such hack (called Bitsy Muse) that ADDS MUSIC TO BITSY GAMES. Needless to say, I was scrambling to get the hack to work, and with enough luck and wrench-smacking, Today, We March was fitted with glamorous background music during key moments, elevating their emotional effect. If you're one of my friends who told me you cried to the game, you can thank my procrastinating July 4 ass on crunch time, baby!

Unc Still Got Art Skills

A screenshot of a room as drawn in Aseprite[5].

Do you know about the meme "Unc still got it🙏😭"? It features a man doing jump rope while sitting down, with the caption "Unc still got it 🙏😭". The GIF is often used to compliment someone who still possesses the ability to perform something, usually in spite of their inactivity.

Yeah. That's how I felt opening up Aseprite again after months of not using it, solely to make the art for Today, We March. The game was made somewhat linearly, so I drew the art for the rooms and tiles as they were needed. I'm rather proud of my artwork on the game, especially considering my rustiness. Turns out, unc really still got it.

/*** [5] For those wondering about the large number of frames, I drew each room in an individual Aseprite frame. There are also the various iterations of Rue's portrait... which count as rooms in the game. It's one of the many... outside-the-box things I had to do to get stuff to work. ***/

Writing — For Me, For You, For Us

A screenshot from the game.

Reading text, listening to characters and narration, immersing oneself with the world, is the crux of the experience in Today, We March. Getting the writing right was imperative, so it was the "step" on which my partner and I spent the most time working (Note: while the structure of this article may denote a sort of chronology in these aspects of game development, none of them was made "one after another". I was drawing as my partner was writing; in effect, all of these parts occurred at the same time). 

Before you forget, recall that Today, We March is a commemoration of my batch's graduation — a special event that holds a significant place in my heart — an event demarcating the boundary between the high school and college chapters of my and all of our lives. While much of our humor was able to shine, this is by no means an "unserious" game. This game, this story, is serious through and through. It's what we lived, of course it means a lot.

I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on the game, its story, its various real life inspirations, and the audiences I had in mind when creating it. Specifically, Today, We March was written not just for me, but also for you, and for us.

TWM was written "for me" in the sense that it acted somewhat like a journal for my graduation experiences. Almost everything in the game: from arriving to school early, to getting my hairpins fixed by my boyfriend, to walking on stage and being greeted by my adviser, and all these things were inspired directly from what I saw on the day itself. In a way, TWM is like a time capsule, holding within it not just my lived being during that day, but also the feelings encapsulated within that vessel of mine, that mixture of captivation, of hope, of fear, of dread. Of missing people. Of bittersweet goodbyes. Of panged regrets. Of wanting to go. Of not... wanting to go.

But I didn't want TWM to be solely a one-man trip, a self-centered journey, so to speak. I wanted it to properly encapsulate the may-have-been feelings of just about anyone who had undergone the same due processes. It wasn't just a crude representation of how I had felt, but maybe how anyone had felt going up that stage, of how you may have felt when you grabbed your diploma — all sweaty hands — off your school's director. This "you"-centric view of the world is what drove me to make TWM character dialogue-heavy rather than introspective monologue-heavy. Rue (the main character) has their own thoughts, but for the most part, you're listening to the thoughts of others. And, if I may be so lucky and honored, perhaps you'll end up listening to yourself, one way or another, by playing the game. 

But... maybe above all else... Today, We March was written "for us". For the batch, maybe. But, more importantly, for all the people I had come to know and love. All of my best friends and close acquaintances — all of them and their spirits and their memories found their way into this game. One of my best friends once said to me, "I am a mosaic of the people I've met." This game is an adaptation of my mosaic, and it's the greatest mosaic I've ever come to know. As usual, an adaptation is an adaptation, and adaptations are never perfect. If I could have, I would have stolen the brainwaves of my friends and electronically transplanted them into the characters of the game. But alas, I had to settle with what I know, what these people have made me feel, and through those I've tried to incorporate their souls into silly bytes of unicode. One may argue that what others made me feel isn't necessarily who they are, and I agree. These people are so much more than the 8x8 caricatures and their 20 or so lines in the game. But I also argue that it's a pretty good interpretation of our community, all things considered. Besides, who are we if not the impact we give?

With that said, to all the people who I've blatantly and unapologetically used as inspiration for Today, We March: thank you. You damn bastards know who you are. I hope you know that you hold a space in my heart, and you're part of who I am today. At its core, this game is about people, and it just so happens to be about people I know. Thank you for making Today, We March what it is. Thank you for making my life what it is.

Final Thoughts

Today, We March is perhaps the most important piece I've worked on so far, and I'm glad I was able to work on it with my best friend and love of my life. This game was a month of long labor and hard work, and since I usually talk about my projects to my friends, it was especially hard to keep things secret this time. I wanted everything to be a surprise! And I'm glad, because the response was breathtaking. People cried to the game... cried!!! I didn't think I could even produce anything with a semblance of emotional prowess, let alone one that could drive people to tears. In fairness, it might be the fresh memory of graduation that did them in... but I like to think I had a hand in this! The fact that people thoroughly enjoyed this experience that we'd worked so hard on — it just makes my heart absolutely melt. Thank you to everyone who dedicated an hour of their lives to hear us out. What took you an hour to complete, took us hundreds to develop, and thousands to experience. Here's to thousands more for us all.

P.S.: Seeing as though the project is all but done, here, have access to this. It's our ideas document. Enjoy.