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Meta Form: A Surrealist point-and-click adventure where words are your inventory.

Meta Form was created as an excuse to integrate dialogue with strong illustration and emotive music. For sale on Itch.io, it was part of Ukraine and Abortion support bundles that raised millions. Featured in Indiepocalypse issue #12.

Team
Casey (me): Technical Game Design, Writing, Music
Collin: Illustration

Engine: Unity
Project Length: 2 months

Game Design

The game mechanic is about obtaining and combining words to unlock progression. The trick is that words have more than one meaning, so the intro illustrates this by saying “There is a Clock on the wall. Wind blows in from outside”. And then you can select “Wind Clock”.

Art Direction – The Core Design Pillar

Created during early COVID era, Meta Form is about the feeling of being trapped inside, escapist desires, different perspectives, and grappling with existential dread in an absurdist way.

 

My favorite fan comment was, “made me cry.”

Planning and Writing

The illustrator and I would often trade off leading scenes. I would write a concept or her would draw something and tell me about it so I could write for it. I have a vivid memory of pulling over on the side of the road once to text an entire description of a character and scene idea to the illustrator. It was a great collaborative effort.

 

Since you have to choose combinations of words, I did my best to make it entertaining as possible as often as possible, even when you make a selection that doesn’t have an effect. Sometimes these worked as clues. For example, if you choose “Key” and then any other word, it will often give you a clue about what to do with that word. “Eyeball” and another word would give you a description, sometimes a tongue-in-cheek play on words. I needed several spreadsheets to write these combos.

 

To plan out the progression through the world, I found a mind map worked extremely well.

Zettes

The Society of Play, a game development community I’m a very active member of sells Meta Form “zettes” at conventions. These are USB thumbdrives packed inside casette cases to sell as a physical package.

 

You can pick one up on the Zette Market!

More Art!