The Best Days
A downloadable game
The Best Days is a game about student life and mental upkeep. It’s about pushing forward through the days and nights while attempting to stay healthy and sane. It’s a game about the invisible hours spent toiling away in a room without company. These are, in short, the best days of your life.
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Recommended Settings:
- 1080p or 4K.
- Headphones (volume > 50%).
- Recommended for Windows.
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Detailed Overview:
The Best Days is a game about anxiety, depression, isolation, time pressure, and boredom, but also one about perseverance and routine in the face of them. It’s been created in response to: A) the idealisation of student life (particularly by nostalgic adults), and B) the over-reliance of ‘black dog’ imagery (or other embodiments) in depicting depression.
This game hopes instead to focus on the mundane experience of depression and anxiety, physiologically, in the context of day-to-day student life. It makes extensive use of post-processing and sound effects to recreate/visualise some of the sensations and experiences involved.
This is drawn entirely from personal experience and is not considered more broadly representative of the student population as a whole.
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This game is currently still somewhat of a prototype in places. That being said, do let me know your thoughts and opinions by leaving a comment or reaching out to me (@MAnsley_).
Please consider sharing the game if you enjoyed it (and think others might ;) ), and feel free to check out some of my other work: https://marcusansley.com/
Stay safe!
~ M
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Full Credits:
Materials and Assets:
- Freepbr.com
- Brackeys' Health Bar.
- Katsukagi, 'Fabric Polyester 001': https://3dtextures.me/2020/02/04/fabric-polyester-001/
- SNAPS Prototyping Assets
Fonts:
- 'Gunny Rewritten' by Vít Èondák, based on Gunny Handwriting (fonty.condak.cz).
- Peepo.
- 'Digital Dream' by Jakob Fischer (pizzadude.dk).
Music:
- 'Happiest Days' by Three Chain Links, freemusicarchive.org
- 'Palms and Seagulls' by Timecrawler 82, freemusicarchive.org
- 'Only A Dream' by Jon Worthy and the Bends, freemusicarchive.org
- 'What a Way - Prélude' by Semaphore, freemusicarchive.org
Sounds:
- 'CRT TV ON' by kklab5050, freesound.org . Cut up and used with several audio sources.
- 'Ticking Clock, A.wav' by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of freesound.org
- 'CRT TV' by kklab550, freesound.org
- 'Heartbeat' by 'Mike Koenig', soundbible.com
- 'Click2' by Sebastian, soundbible.com
- 'Carpet footsteps.wav' by redjim, freesound.org
- Additional sounds from www.zapsplat.com
Download
Install instructions
For Mac users: you may need to command + click, then select 'Open' to get past a potential 'unidentified developer error' (associated with Catalina).
Comments
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It was a very strong and vivid experience, my final exams start tomorrow and all these feelings are more relevant than ever. And all this “these are truly the best days of your life” thing is extremely real, people never get tired of saying that no matter how and what for you study and for how long etc.
Great game, loved it. But the only complaint I guess is that it's quite inobvious which objects can be interacted with the left mouse button and which are not, on the opposite with the big “press e to do smth” hint.
Thank you so much for making it.
Thank you so much for your feedback with it -- really glad you enjoyed it (and sorry it came right before your final exams (hope they're going well!)) :)
My narrative teacher Maddalena Grattarola (@madposthumanist) introduced me to your work with 'It's Winter', and the environmental design and minimalism there made a really big impression (and was one of the main sources of inspiration for this game) ;)
Thank you so much for playing it.
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