Glimmer
“At that moment, my world was filled with many glimmers.” Glimmer makes emotional recovery playable: the more you’re hurt, the darker and narrower your vision, until friends, notes, and small kindnesses light the world back up, one object at a time.
The system
- The rule
- Mood is light. Friends raise it, bullies drain it, and every level you climb is kept.
- What the player feels
- At your lowest you are fast and strong, and you can barely see a thing.
- What it says
- Strength alone does not get you out. The last door opens for the people behind you.
An emotion system you can see
The mood bar is the game. A high mood floods the scene with light and reveals more interactable objects: blue-outlined things you can touch, blue ghosts (friends and teachers) you can talk to. A low mood dims the world to near-black, leaving only a few objects visible.
It’s a deliberate risk/reward inversion: a lower mood grants more speed and attack but strips away vision and scope, while the goal is always to climb back toward the light. Red ghosts (bullies) push the mood down; blue ghosts pull it up. Each time you reach a new mood level, that gain becomes permanent.
Telling the story through space
Glimmer opens on a threatening letter and a classroom swarmed by red ghosts, brightness crashing to zero as the screen distorts and fades to black. From there the player walks a long, dark hallway of bullies before finding the one unlocked classroom, a blue ghost, and a notebook that raises the light by a whole level.
Progress is narrative and spatial rather than menu-driven: a birthday-password locker, mementos that surface as memory fragments when the mood reaches Level 3, and a final door that only opens once enough blue ghosts, the glimmers, stand behind you.
My role
Glimmer was a two-person project. I wrote the game design doc and CRC cards, constructed the story, and built scenes 1-4 with their lighting; I handled player movement and animation, the emotion bar, UI, and sourced or created the art and sound. My teammate Travis focused on the systems programming: ghost tracking, the brightness system, cutscenes, and the dialogue function.