Portugues
A Day in the Woods
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About the game
A Day in the Woods is a very short story game played on an old hand-drawn map. A narrator tells you about a man and an ordinary day in his life: he goes to the well, carries the water home, sets the fire, mends the fence. You are the little red dot on the map, and the way you play is by doing what the story says. When the narrator says he went to the well, you walk to the well.
The trick is what happens when you stop listening. Wander off the way the story is going and the narrator scolds you, the map goes dark, and the day starts over. But now and then a small marker appears, a sign that the story has a place for you to disagree, and stepping off the path at that moment does not restart the day: it changes it. The map opens up further each time, with a bridge, a river, a forest to the south, a tower, and a view all the way to the sea.
Ditam made it in the Ludum Dare 47 game jam, whose theme was "Stuck in a loop", and it fits: a time loop told in a handful of sentences. It takes only a few minutes, so it is best played in one sitting, with sound on.
Playing it here
Click Play and click once on the page so it hears the keyboard. Move the red dot with the arrow keys; footprints show where you have been. The speaker icon below the map turns the sound on (it starts muted) and the "mobile controls" button shows four arrows to tap on a touch screen. Nothing is saved.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | walk the red dot across the map |
| Speaker icon | sound on or off |
| "mobile controls" button | show touch arrows |
A few things worth knowing
Follow the narration closely at first. Each sentence names a place; go there directly, without detours, until you see the marker.
The marker is the point of the game. When it shows up, you are allowed to break the pattern.
Turn the sound on. The music and the sound of the writing are part of the mood.
Credits and licence
A Day in the Woods was made by ditam and is released under the MIT License (the code, with jQuery 3.5.1, also MIT). The pictures are based on Kenney's Cartography Pack, and the three music tracks are by Oddroom, Joth and isaiah658 from OpenGameArt; the author states that all images and sounds are in the public domain (CC0). The handwriting font is Dancing Script, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and served from this site instead of Google Fonts, which is the only change we made. The source of this build is linked from this page.