OBEY TO SURVIVE

Many generations of mice have been working in the boiler room to keep the fire burning for their master. The disobedient ones are taken away by the guard and are never seen again.

The next mouse will then take its turn to heat the water, a endless cycle of chopping wood, fuelling and fanning the fire.

DISOBEY TO LIVE

As you saw the mouse before you collapsing you also saw means of escape. You could craft a trap for the guard and lead your fellow captives to freedom.

But remember to keep the steam pressure high enough to avoid being taken and replaced. Can you escape a life of obedience?

CONTROLS

Use ARROW keys to walk around.

Use SPACE to interact with outlined objects.

Use NUMBER keys [1, 2, 3, 4] to choose inventory item.

GAME JAM

Created as a submission for the Summer Slow Jams 2023: Crafting game jam.

The technical theme was Crafting and the creative theme DIWhy. We interpreted the creative theme as  "Why do something?" Why obey commands that only serve others?

We took inspiration from Overcooked, a game where the player constantly needs to juggle different activities to prepare a meal. In Disobey we make the player perform simple tasks; chopping wood, bringing it to the fire, and then fanning the fire. A loop that they can perform endlessly without any progression. The player just obeys the tasks the game asks of them.

Then we combined the above with the board game Mouse Trap, where players construct a contraption that when triggered causes a chain reaction to eventually trap a mouse. In Disobey players also construct a trap by interacting with the environment. The chain reaction part is however minimal as we ran out of time. It is a game jam after all!

The player now needs to juggle between maintaining the fire and crafting an escape. It became a time-pressured-point-and-click-like :)

Created by dad & son :)