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.
Heritage isn’t a mechanic, so we couldn’t fall back on a genre we already knew. We built the game around an object instead: the mandoos, a chest people were trusted to keep safe.
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 was the part I cared about most. The chest needed to feel heavy and worth protecting, not like an item in an inventory, and pulling it on a rope does that.
Three days
The build was due at 16:00 on day three. I put the subtitle system in early so the team could keep writing the story while the rest of the game was still changing.
We didn’t place, but the game is playable from start to finish.