The storm took everything — even my friend. But I have the mandoos. I am its guardian now.
Al Amana is a short narrative survival game about carrying a traditional Emirati chest across the desert after a storm, and about what it means to have been trusted with something.
The brief
The Heritage Gameathon is run by Abu Dhabi Gaming and the Abu Dhabi Heritage Authority with Unity, and it asks for games drawn from Emirati heritage — architecture, crafts, landscapes, folklore. The theme lands on the morning of day one and the build is due by the afternoon of day three.
That framing does something useful to a jam. Heritage is not a mechanic, so a team can’t reach for the genre it already knows how to build. We went for an object instead of a subject: the mandoos is a real thing people were given and expected to keep, so the game could be about the keeping.
What I worked on
Six of us, three days. I took the interaction and moment-to-moment layer: the rope pull the chest is dragged with, the trigger volumes the world uses to react to the player, the out-of-bounds recovery, and the subtitle and dialogue system the story is told through — plus the scene flow that stitches menu, intro and main scene into one runnable build.
The rope is the piece I’d defend. Dragging is a chore in most games, and the point here was that the chest should feel like a burden you chose rather than an item in an inventory. Weight you can feel through a rope does more for a promise than a line of dialogue about one.
What three days teaches
Nothing that isn’t in the build at 16:00 on day three exists. The subtitle system went in early for that reason — it was the cheapest way to carry a story that six people could keep writing against while the rest of the game was still moving underneath it.
We didn’t place. The game is playable start to finish, which for a three-day team of six is the result I’d have taken going in.