4.- THE STORY
With the main barebones of the game concept, I would need a story. It needed to be a very short one, as the time available was very short, and needed to be explained very quickly.
In real life I sometimes make stupid “puppet” movements with my hand. Yep, I’m that kind of person, and Jim Henson is also one of my inspirations. It was just a matter of chance, or perhaps fate, that just in those days my wife told me– probably joking– “You should make a game with that hand as a puppet”.
And that was the spark: I was carried there by the winds of restrictions, but just at that moment I REALLY WANTED to make a game mixing hand drawing childish graphics with real images from my puppet hand.
My mind started to boil with ideas about that, and I had to look back to the pillar of “send something funny and light to the comp” and stick to it, or the game would never come to life.
I have seen lovely things mixing cartoons and real images, such as the “The Amazing World of Gumball” TV show (yep, I’m also the kind of big boy still watching cartoons), and they work very well in that medium.
I started to see in my game something that perhaps needs some psychological therapy I can’t afford: The childish drawings fighting against the real adult world. The hand made drawings fighting against the real hand that creates them. The fight of the son against the father.
Then, my “puppet” hand had to be the antagonist. That’s how “The Evil Meat Hand” born, and that’s how I get the title: “Gent Stickman vs Evil Meat Hand”.
Some of those things are skeleton parts that are not visible in a game or a story, but they help make things coherent while building things around an idea, no matter if the final player will not know about them.
At this moment I had a protagonist and an antagonist, but still needed the story itself. Needing to be short and easily and universally understood, I resorted to the classical archetypes: A knight going to the rescue of a princess to free her from the evil “dragon like” silhouette of my puppet hand. And the princess could not be other than the “Lady” hand drawing in the toilet’s door. That was how “Lady” was born.
The story can seem a bit surrealist, but is an archetypical one (in its basis, not its details of course), and I was sure it would work. The cartoonish look and feel would fill any gap in the “plausible” side.