Beggar's Feast
Beggar's Feast is a small game project I developed over the course of a week in my game design course. We were challenged to take a scene from Homer's Odyssey and create a game out of it, emphasizing environments and dialogue over actual gameplay. (Normally I would consider this backwards, but it was good for me to experience a different approach.)
I chose to depict a scene from Book 17 wherein Odysseus, disguised as an old beggar, returns to his home palace in Ithaca, now overrun with suitors attempting to steal the hand of his wife. As the suitors eat him out of house and home, Odysseus walks up to each of them and begs for food. Ultimately, this is an attempt to judge the character of each suitor, sizing them up for the inevitable conflict and bloodshed of the later chapters.

First, I modeled a few rooms of Odysseus' palace in Cinema 4D. I then used provided NPC prefabs and scripts to create a dinner scene. At this point, I couldn't help but inject a gameplay goal into the scenario: Odysseus must speak with the suitors to gain hints about which suitors are gentle and which are hateful. Gentle suitors (like Amphinomus) will give Odysseus one piece of food, and they will also generally give a hint regarding which of the remaining suitors are gentle or hateful. Examples of hints might include the following:
– "For some reason, all of the suitors with black hair at the blue table are incredibly hateful..."
– "The man across the table from me has been frowning the entire evening. I dare not speak to him, and I suggest you do the same!"
– "Only one other man sitting on the edge of this table is as kind as me!"
– "I hear Antinous likes to sit with a column to his back..."
On the other hand, hateful suitors (like Antinous) will berate and abuse Odysseus, tossing a stool at him and reducing his total food count by three. The object of the game is to solve this Layton-esque puzzle through dialogue and logical conclusions. It is completely possible to find every piece of food without guessing.

While not the most impressive project, I learned a lot about the art side of things in game development through modeling and texturing. (Namely, that I'm not terribly proficient at it...) The game itself might no be terribly compelling, but I was rather shocked with how well the puzzle turned out. It's actually fairly decent, each hint exploring a different means of examining the data and applying knowledge and logic to reach a conclusion.
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Plus, creating the hateful suitors was kind of fun.
(...What assholes!)
