Patti Veedu

The brief

Patti Veedu, Tamil for grandmother’s house , is a 2D point-and-click adventure about two sisters who go to visit their grandma and find her missing in an open house. They start looking. The house starts revealing things. Slowly, through the puzzles they solve and the rooms they explore, they discover a person they had never quite seen, the woman behind the grandmother.

It was my fourth-year design project at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. The idea was small and personal: that there is always more to your parents or grandparents than the part of them you grew up with, and a good way to find it is through the things they kept.

The approach

This was the first game I ever made. I had no engine experience, no code, no prior puzzle-design instincts. I picked GameMaker because it was approachable, and Procreate because I already drew there, and I started small, one room, two characters, three things to click on. The whole project was built that way: room by room, problem by problem, learning the engine as I went.

The biggest reference was my own grandmother. She was a storyteller and an extremely selfless person, the kind who would give the same story away to different people in slightly different ways depending on who needed to hear it. I wanted to make something about that. The other reference was Deponia, a hand-drawn point-and-click series that proved you could carry a whole game on art and rhythm without needing scale.

The work

The whole game is hand-drawn. Two assets carried it , the backgrounds of the house and the characters who walk through them.

Every room of the grandmother’s house was drawn in Procreate as a single illustrated background. The house had to feel specific, Tamil, lived-in, a little overstuffed in the way real grandparent homes are, so each room got its own small inventory of things to look at. The backgrounds weren’t just sets. They were the puzzles.

Three principal characters: the two sisters, drawn slightly different from each other so the player could tell them apart at a glance, and Patti herself, seen only in flashbacks and traces, never as a character the player meets directly. The sisters were animated frame by frame for the few movements they needed. Patti’s presence was carried entirely through the things she left behind.