The story of Gods Will be Watching is very interesting and is a good proof of the talent that exists in Spain, although there is no professional and financial structure to support it.
The game was one of the participants in the Ludum Dare 26, one of the most important and notorious game programming jams of the independent scene. The theme then was “minimalism” and a small team settled in Valencia was launched to the challenge of creating a minimalist survival game in 72 hours, the maximum time to enter the contest. The result was impressive in more than one sense: aesthetically enjoyed a wide
advantage over many of the contenders, equipped as it was with an evocative graphic style full of personality, with well-defined characters endowed with subtle but indicative animations, thrown in an alien place. Many games in a Ludum Dare are usually quite crude in terms of graphics, more concerned with the concept and execution than in the presentation, but the Spanish project shone with its own light in that aspect.
And once the game entered you through the eyes, it was time to discover the great ingenuity that he kept inside. Trapped in a remote planet, threatened by a lethal virus and with the right resources, the game invited us to take the reins and manage the group in a limit situation. Each day had five shifts and had to keep in mind aspects such as food, the moral of the group and
the repair of the necessary radio to send a distress signal and escape. You had to take care of supplies of antidotes for the virus, take care of the number of bullets and, when the time came, you had to evaluate the possibility of killing someone from the group so
that the rest would survive-that or let him go crazy, in which case he would escape and he never came back. Everything very simple and, that, minimalist, but that as a whole forms a complicated set of equilibriums that made it a real challenge. A clear example of doing a lot with little.
The game stood out so much that it reached a considerable media presence, with blogs as important as Rock Paper Shotgun dedicating individual entries, which propelled the downloads and encouraged the team to a more ambitious step: a crowdfunding in indiegogo. The good work of the team and the fact that they had a perfect proof of concept ready to show them was well worth
exceeding their goals of € 8,000 to reach 20,000, in a development that would take the main base and expand it across the board. long, including more scenarios, cohesive a story and delving into the kind of possibilities that this seemingly simple approach can offer.
And here we are, before a commercial title of national origin, with its Steam page and a price of 10 euros, for which we will have access to a much more lasting experience than we would have expected.
The game is divided by episodes, connected to some narrative piece. Each episode is composed of some kind of situation that we must manage. And all are hard and morally complex. First, we are responsible for successfully maintaining the kidnapping of four
innocent workers, with the aim of buying the necessary time to download the data of a virus. We must keep an eye on the advancing guards, the security of the network and the nervousness of the hostages: if they are too relaxed or too nervous,
they will try to escape and you will have to decide if you let them live or die in their flight. You can also choose to drop one to gain some advantage such as having the guards walk away, which will give us a valuable extra time and also facilitate our task to have a hostage
less to monitor – although we must be careful not to keep only one, as the guards will be more aggressive in that case. Things like talking, yelling or hitting the held scientists will allow us to stay on top of their morale and keep them under control while we finish the job.
