Some brief dev notes (May 2025)

When thinking about ordinary moments and gestures that are emotionally charged, taking someone's hand came to my mind very quickly. As I am focusing on micro-interactions in story-driven games for my research-creation PhD, I've tried to design something that would require the least amount of inputs, while telling a mundane story between two people. Using only mouse buttons (hence your hand/fingers) to interact also came naturally to my mind for a game about holding hands (and letting go).

(Side note from the live playtests I had: It was quite interesting to see how unnatural it was for people to right-click in this particular context! And the unexpected feelings that came from it.)

all those times is a very small game (game poem?) almost without words. Instead of telling the story of one specific moment in a romantic relationship, it focuses on small moments. All those times when two people felt some intimacy and tried to take the other's hand, or parted ways.

I had a very specific question in mind while designing this game: What makes little moments meaningful in a relationship? Is it about what is being said or done at a given time? My first design ideas were a lot more about this (incomplete) assumption: Two people having a conversation, and the player could decide whether they would be holding hands or letting go while talking. It was pretty much inspired by the Negotiation Screens in Theme Park, where you had to bait your opponent to shake hands at the right moment, and get the best price for what you needed.

I felt a bit stuck with this idea for a while, because I couldn't get out of the usual game binary I wanted to avoid: There would be a "positive" and a "negative" way of playing the relationship. Why would you purposefully choose to let the hand go, if that felt bad? Or the other way around? Especially in a 5-minute game where you don't really have the time to know a lot about the characters?

Then I remembered (among many other things) a thing I love in manga and anime: When there's a duel between two characters, and right before a super impressive move (like in a shonen manga), there's a flashback about why the move is so significant to them, expressing all the hard work that went into it, how it echoes some sort of emotional growth. What lasts a second in combat turns into one, if not several episodes. I've always loved that sort of time dilatation -- in a sequential media, a flashback can bring more weight to a moment in the present, when done well. It's also like how Proust enjoys so much eating a madeleine and wrote seven books about it, etc.

all those times is sort of an interactive attempt to do a little bit of that. How a little moment is never so little -- if it's meaningful, it's because it is echoing a lot more. A fancy word I also thought of is "synecdoche" -- a figure of speech where you mention only a part of a thing as a shorthand for the whole (like saying "sails" instead of mentioning a ship). Maybe interactivity can bring more weight to an emotional beat, in a particular way -- and many games already do this. Florence of course was a ref for all those times. 1000xResist was another unexpected inspiration (where they sometimes use game inputs as movie cuts, almost). In my case I also settled for something that is not a 100% linear, to see what would happen. Each button tells the point of view of a character specifically -- I had a specific story in mind while designing the game's structure and characters, but ultimately there are many ways to interpret what happened to each of them.

If you're curious to know what the story was in my head (but it is not canon -- whatever you thought of while playing is) while making the game, here goes:

• "left click": unravels the story of the left character (and technically I'm showing their right hand, but let's not make this even more confusing). They grew closer to the other person during youth (the yellow background, with sort of a child's desk), then things fell off for them during adult times (the white/pink background).
• "right click": unravels the story of the right character. Their feelings grew stronger during adult times (the white/pink background). They didn't care much about the other during youth (the yellow background).

The only time those two felt in sync is during the purple phase (with the drinks). So yeah, it was a crisscrossing pattern in my mind. It's maybe awfully complicated for such a short game, but I was more focused on how to layer things in a way that would feel the most "accurate" to what these characters are feeling -- and in their romantic relationship, boundaries were fuzzy, and it's hard for them to remember who felt what and when.

I really had lovely comments about the game at Ludodrome (a live event in Montreal). While this story is not exactly autobiographical, I felt vulnerable while making it because I tried not to hide behind my usual tricks -- like in that Game Changer episode. I'm not a standup comedian but I fully get how easy it is to hide behind jokes or other tricks as a creative. For all those times I tried to be as earnest as possible.