Written by: Not Quite Black & White
Our game is a modern 2D point-and-click adventure called This is No Time for Games. It’s a sci-fi fairytale where you play as Florence Holloway, a data verification technician in a future crime lab, where high-profile murders are solved by artificial intelligence. Through some amateur investigating, Flo bumbles her way into a bizarre and dangerous digital world of creatures called “Apps” who all have a story to tell.
The gameplay of the genre will be updated in This is No Time for Games to heighten the excitement and increase the player’s immersion in the puzzles and dialogue – but we haven’t released any info about that yet.
Our inspiration to make the game was undoubtedly to create a story of our own. We were in the TV/media industries (sound post-production, and graphic design) and kinda bored of polishing other people’s projects. We’ve been writing together for over ten years and we started writing stories for games about six(ish) years ago. We’re also big point-and-click adventure fans frustrated with how few of them actually get made, so we want to make one in our own style that will give adventure game fans something familiar, but something new at the same time.
The game itself has many sources of inspiration. We want the game to have a great protagonist like Guybrush Threepwood or Manny Calavera – we don’t think there’s a female character as funny or as charismatic as these characters in adventure games. The closest are possibly Laverne from Day of The Tentacle or more recently GLaDOS from Portal. We want Florence Holloway to be comical and loveable in the way that characters of the old Lucas Arts classics were.
We also love surprises in games. Sword and Sworcery had some really innovative ways of solving puzzles and Monument Valley did some really clever things. The best puzzles are the ones where you want to rip your hair out and the answer turns out to be right in front of you. We want all of these things in This is No Time for Games.
It’s not out yet. Release is all dependent on money, unfortunately. We’ve been looking into crowdfunding with an exciting new platform called gamekicker.org, so, depending on how successful that is, we could see the game released as early as next year. We were at the global game jam at the end of January and we made a game in a similar style to This is No Time for Games called Don’t Stop Bereavin. The response from the other jammers was amazing. They really seemed into the artwork and the mystery surrounding the puzzles. We plan to polish it up and try and release it in the next couple of months.
Real Women of Gaming 