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, so they start looking around. 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.

This was my fourth-year design project at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad.

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 other reference was Deponia, a hand-drawn point-and-click series that proved you could carry a whole game on good storytelling, small puzzles and art.

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.

The game was small and had 5 characters that we meet in total. I wanted their looks to reflect my background while being whimsical.