Weeping Willow

Weeping Willow

“A game for your mother”

As a submission to the 2022 Macromedia Game Jam, Weeping Willow was the only serious game in the line-up.

This serious game deals with the mental health of parents in a toxic relationship and the effects that it has on the child. You play as the child, the most helpless one in the whole ordeal.

Gallery

  • Title Card

    The theming of the game is very foresty. The title and the logo should reflect that.

  • the abusive father threatens the depressive mother

    Your mother is in a deep depressive state and cannot get out of bed. The constant berating of her shadowy, verbally abusive husband does not help either.

  • you as the helpless child

    At the center of this situation are you: a child. Barely old enough to comprehend what is happening, you are tasked with keeping the household afloat.

  • the child has to take care of the household

    Clean up after your father, cook, and clean the dishes afterward too. You can’t even reach the sink or stove without a stepping stool yet…

  • you have to manage your parents' emotions

    As time goes on, your father will continue to become more and more threatening. Make sure to keep him content until help arrives!

  • write letters to your aunt daily to ask for help

    In your desperation you send letters to your aunt, your mother’s sister. In those letters you describe the abuse that is happening and beg her to hurry.

  • your only way out

    The only way out of your house is the main door and your father has the key. Your aunt does have a spare key though. Hopefully she can get you and your mother out of there…

play it here!

The game can be downloaded for free on itch.io!

Go to the Weeping willow Page on itch.io

skills

and

  • teamwork and -management

  • level design

  • narrative design

  • 2D art

  • becoming familiar with the game design pipeline

  • creating a story about serious topics in a sensitive manner

programs

  • clip studio paint

  • adobe photoshop

  • miro

  • a recording booth

The Design process

as this game was created for a game jam, our team only had a limited amount of time to make a fully functional and coherent game.

I worked as a 2D Asset Artist and project manager, and lent a helping hand in whatever else needed to be done.

Our team consisted of Juni Schulze, Lukas Frank, lucia Möllenbruck, Anabel Bunk, and myself.

with the game jam topic being “a game for your mother”, we decided we could create a serious game about parental mental health and the effects of abusive relationships on children.

We first set out to define a storyline and set limits on how much abuse we wanted to portray. Since this game is from the perspective of a child and children don’t yet have a full understanding of situations like these, we stylised a lot of what is shown.

The strong visual style is supported by 2d characters and assets in a 3d game space. It creates a picture-book atmosphere.

The work was divided as such:

I created the 2d assets, assisted with some of the writing, voiced the ending sequence, and supervised the workflow

“Weeping willow” secured a top spot at the game jam.

Jana Schulze designed and animated the characters, Lukas frank programmed the game in unreal engine, Anabel bunk wrote the story and the letters to the aunt, Lucia möllenbruck created the 3d assets as well as the title card.