Rose: For someone who has never heard of your game, how would you describe it without using the usual genre labels?
A meditative visual puzzle game about family and migration. You tend an overgrown seaside garden alongside a young girl and her elderly neighbour, and each puzzle you solve brings a little more of their story to light.
Rose: Where did the idea for this game come from?
I love growing veggies in the garden, and I volunteer on landscaping and bush regeneration projects around our community. Everything about it felt like a little puzzle, from working out where a plant belongs to clearing a patch so something new can grow. The theme grew alongside this growing appreciate of our local ecology. Gardens and communities have a lot in common, in the way they must be tended and maintained. I also feel a great sense of grief with the changing of seasons, when the flowering ends, when plants must be ripped up for the winter and I feel like that also ties in with the grief of being away from home. There is so much joy alongside the grief of all the people (and plants!) you love and miss so much.
Rose: What makes your game different from other games in the same space?
There are very few African games in this space, and there is a lot of demand for games in the spirit of Little to the Left. Good Hands pairs its puzzles with a small story, set in a context and around a protagonist that players don’t often get. Older people also have a solid presence in the story, and as I age, I’d love to see more of this in games.
Rose: Was there anything you had to cut that you still secretly wish you could put back?
Puzzles that made perfect sense to me and to nobody else. If a puzzle needed me in the room to explain it, it had to go, and I do miss a few of them.
Rose: What is something players probably won't realize took an absurd amount of work?
The juice. Making every interaction feel smooth and satisfying took far longer than I expected, from pieces that wiggle when they hover near their spot to the pop as they snap into place. Changing wiggles by such tiny amounts feels maddening, but I’m still learning how to get this right. I also spent ages hunting for the right sounds, especially for completing a level. When those were off, the whole game felt off, and getting them right makes such a difference. It’s one of the most consistent feedbacks I’ve received over playthroughs.
Rose: What is the weirdest bug you've encountered that you almost wanted to keep?
I have a level where you can drop sugar cubes into a cup of chai. Somehow, the cubes kept multiplying instead of disappearing into the tea and I thought it was pretty funny.
Rose: Is there a particular emotion you wanted players to walk away with from your game?
I’d like players to understand that many economic migrants are forced to leave home and would have chosen to stay. I want them to feel the delicate balance of joy, heartache nostalgia and longing. Plants grow and die with the seasons and the weather, or simply because it was time.
Rose: What's one piece of advice you wish you'd had before starting?
Build better systems from the start. Parts of Good Hands feel like I clobbered things together, and creating a proper system from front to back now is far more complicated than it would have been at the beginning. But at the time, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I envisioned a very short, simple game that I’d build in a very short amount of time, but I think we all know how that goes with scope creep!
Rose: Five years from now, what do you hope people remember about this game?
The story, the setting, East African culture and the dishes the characters love, like vitumbua and sambusa. I’d also love for players to come away with a small love for gardening.
Rose: Why should someone reading/watching this go play your game today?
It’s a fun, short game, especially if you like puzzles with a story in an often unrepresented geographical setting. You can play a few levels at a time, so it fits easily into a free half hour.
Rose: Finally, the question we ask every developer: After everything you’ve told us, can you officially confirm that your game is, in fact, probably a game?
It's definitely a game LOL there are puzzles to solve, levels to progress through, a small story to work your way through, tiny moments of reflection and the A-HA when something clicks into place. That’s a game, right? Probably.