Covid 19 - The Final Disease

At the beginning of the Game Jam during which this little game was developed, what would happen in Italy was totally unpredictable. It was just the first week of March 2020.

As the theme  'Hunting Ground' came up, we decided to develop a top-down twin-stick shooter game and my first idea was talking about the worst enemy humanity has been hunting these last months. I think that video games can entertain people and, at the same time, talk about the big deals of our age, about 'us', like all arts are supposed to do. However, I had some troubles dealing with this topic at a certain point of the development. In Saturday evening, I heard the news that the red zone in Italy had been extended by a law decree; realizing to be in a quarantine zone makes an impression, I felt the people I love most scared that night. Apocalyptic feelings. Coming back to my PC, I worked on different enemy assets (mainly viruses, bacteria, and microbes) but I started rejecting the idea to continue working on this game; the topic was nauseating to me at that moment. I struggled with this for almost an hour, then I started focusing on something else. The solution was the Hero. I ignored the virus and I started working on the main character, AGENT P. (a Patogen Agent, of course), inoculated by a vaccine in an infected human body with the task of destroying the coronavirus, the final boss. We didn't finalize the Hero and we didn't develop the boss fight we planned, but working on this part of the design was a real relief for me. AGENT P. is, in a certain sense, the hero we need in today's situation. This is why I love video games: they allow you to be a hero like this, and at the end you can think "we can beat this boss in real life too, like we are doing in this game". We are not scientists or doctors (who are the real heroes), we are just developers and this is our best way to fight COVID-19. Maybe this message won't rise from this little prototype, but the work I made this weekend, during this Game Jam, reminded once again the reason why I love this job: I hope the same message will reach some player who enjoys the game and gets relief in this situation - the same relief I felt while developing it.