From Game Jam To Full Time – ‘Gods Will Be Watching’ Hits IndieGoGo

Last April, Ludum Dare 26 had developers scrambling to complete a game in three days. Among the 2,345 games produced was Deconstructeam’s Gods Will Be Watching. Since Ludum Dare 26′s theme was Minimalism, Deconstructeam created Gods Will Be Watching as a point-and-click adventure game, set in just a single scene. The objective of the game was to simply survive long enough to get rescued from the game’s unforgiving climate. The entire game jam entry is playable in-browser, for free, on Deconstructeam’s website.

It’s a pretty challenging little game. My Survivorman binge-watching on Netflix did not pay off, and my entire crew died during the first night. I probably should have remembered to light a fire though…

The overall praise that Deconstructeam received from their Gods Will Be Watching Ludum Dare entry inspired the team to stick with the project, and expand it into a full title.

“We don’t want just to make the game bigger, but deeper,” Deconstructeam explains on the Gods Will Be Watching IndieGoGo campaign page. “The remake won’t be just about surviving on a hostile planet, but to overcome several difficult situations that will expand both the storyline and universe of sergeant Burden and his crew, and will offer new moral dilemmas in order to stay alive.”

Since Deconstructeam is no longer working under the time restrictions of the Ludum Dare game jam, they will be able to add in a more reactive artificial intelligence system, and they gave the example that if a player chooses to kick a character to the ground, that character’s friends will become sad and lose moral.

“We want to tell a beautiful story and explore human ethics in this game, not only an amusing sci-fi plot but embedding a message and multiple interpretations for anyone who will play Gods Will Be Watching, since we feel the game has a perfect environment and mood for such thing.”

By the end of development, Gods Will Be Watching will have six levels with about ten hours of gameplay (or in my case, hundreds of hours considering I’ll probably forget to light a fire again), new cinematics, an achievement system which unlocks bonus goodies, and the aforementioned empathy system.

Visit Gods Will Be Watching on IndieGoGo and follow the developers on Twitter.