Aki

You're an old monk looking after a Japanese shrine in the mountains. You grow and harvest crops, forage the forest for mushrooms and pinecones, fetch sake from the cellar and clean the tombs, all to prepare three offerings for the spirits of the dead.

Each offering needs three things: a crop, something foraged and one special item (the sake, a candle or a talisman). Every finished offering hangs a shide, a paper streamer, on the main torii gate, so progress is shown in the world instead of in a menu. With three shide on the gate, the monk performs the final ritual and the game ends.

A small spirit follows you from the start. After the second offering it disappears and you have to go and find it. The monk's thoughts hint at who it is: “You always bring me where we got married.”

Instead of one big twist, I built the limitation into every task, so the shrine keeps living while your back is turned.

• Crops only grow while you're away. They have three stages and move up one each time you leave the field, so you forage in the meantime and come back to check on them.
• Spirits steal from the altars. Items you leave on the shrine can go missing once you walk away, one to three times per offering. A sound tells you it happened, the spirits make noise so you can track them down, and clicking one makes it drop what it took.
• Tombs get dirty again. You have to clean all of them in one visit. Leave halfway and every tomb is dirty again.
• The little spirit leaves. After the second offering your companion vanishes. Finding it gives you the talisman for the last offering.

To keep the stealing from turning into a chore, there's one extra altar we called the “glorified trash can”. You can drop duplicate items there at any time, and every item you offer on it lowers how often spirits steal from you, down to a minimum of once.

Apart from the art, which my teammates made, I was involved in every step on this page. I designed and implemented the mechanics: harvesting, foraging, carrying and depositing items, the stealing spirits, tomb cleaning, the offerings and the final ritual. I also reworked the map, designed the main menu and made all of the game's VFX and particles.

Scope was part of the job. Early plans had a fermentation step for the sake and forage spots that respawned when you left; we simplified both so the core loop could be finished within the jam.

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VFX & particles

All of the effects in Aki are mine. They're also how the game talks to the player: glows show you where to go, and every pickup gets a bit of feedback.

• Programming a whole game. Aki is my first fully completed game. Building every system from start to finish made me a much more confident programmer.
• Handling several tasks at once. Between mechanics, the map and the VFX, I learned to keep several tasks moving at the same time instead of finishing them one by one.
• Coordinating a small team. With three people, staying in sync mattered. Sharing boards like the ones on this page helped us agree on how each system worked and what to cut.