# Overview

A narrative game revolving around four soldiers, and their journey back home.

As always, the jam entry page can be found here

# Design

Silent Whisper is essentially a bunch of random events. Your options are constrained by resources, and outcomes can be modified by spending resources, earlier decisions, and sometimes just sheer luck.

The idea was to be a Story Generator of sorts, with a gritty atmosphere.

# Tech

This was my first attempt at doing a narrative heavy game. Lovely kana had some writing but it was all pretty light. Silent Whisper was the logical evolution of that design; more events, more writing, more mechanics.

The biggest issue, by far, was just keeping everything in my head. This was before I had a proper tool for this (Butai, and later Flow), so the whole thing was a giant XML file. It was… not pretty. Edits were hard to understand, changes were hard to test, and it was way too easy to build scenarios where some events could never trigger, or would always trigger, or would just soft lock the game.

I learned my lesson here, but suffered greatly for it.

# Heaps

Historically, my web games had leveraged pixi.js, but with Silent Whisper, I chose to try something new and used Heaps. The motivation here was that while Haxe itself supports multiple targets, including a native desktop target; pixi.js obviously did not. By leveraging Heaps, I could still produce web versions of my games, but also have native desktop builds later if I decided to continue a project post jam.

Since Silent Whisper wasn’t graphically complex, this was a good “first jam” project.

# Play

The latest version can be found here