Fabi
Reichsoellner
Little Magpie's first home away from the nest
Leaving the nest is a short decoration game created during LudumDare54 with the theme 'Limited Space'. Our interpretation of the limitation is the story of a little magpie moving into their first University flat.
​
Credits:
Art, Story - Fabi Reichsoellner
Code - Jack Chateau-Loney
Design:
Leaving the nest has a simple gameplay-loop, the player receives a new item and can drag it into the designated space to decorate the room.
There were a few core elements we added to this to make the game more interesting:
​
-
To honour the theme of 'Limited Space', the player cannot put all the items available into the room.
-
As a consequence of this, players have to decide what to include and what to omit from their room.
​
-
Players are also able to change their mind and remove or return items to redecorate.
At the beginning of the game, the player is asked to enter their name and once they have decided they are happy with their room, a personalised polaroid picture of the finished room is available and the players' are encouraged to share their design with us via a prewritten tweet.
This was intended to not only make this game memorable to our players but also encourage others to create their own room.
Narrative:
Instead of giving a lot of exposition at the beginning of the game, I mainly focused on the details of each interaction.
Each of the 25 items has a little sentence either commenting on the birds' thoughts on this particular piece of furniture or shows a glimpse of the magpies background, sprinkling in some light-hearted jokes and puns.
​
When removing an item, the game randomly plays one of 15 different quips and if the player changes their mind again one of eight monologue options is displayed.
​
There are also 3 ending variations in order to keep the game slightly more interesting after the first playthrough.
Art:
Since the limitation of 'A purrfect catastrophe', I have been experimenting with limiting my colour palette, this jam being monochrome purples. I kept shading to a minimum to stop the room from looking too messy when filling it to the brim with furniture and to stick to the schedule of a jam.
​
The art in leaving the nest is created to support the narrative, the main menu is a notebook entry with little polaroid pictures about moving and postage stamps as the start and quit buttons. The ending screen is also a polaroid of the finished room (with the guides removed) and a letter home to mama bird, who is mentioned a few times in the story.
To enliven the scene, I created multiple different emotions for the magpie sitting on the right, who will pose to match its commentary on the furniture.
Additionally, the lamps will spawn simple vfx when placed in the room and the washing machine spins.
Translation:
Leaving the nest is available in English and German. The English word count is 616, and 596 in the German translation.
My main focus when translating is to keep the original meaning of the narrative intact while incorporating some terminology and jokes unique to the German language. This was important in this project, as there are a lot of puns and jokes in the text which I wanted to preserve to keep the game's charm no matter the language.
