You play as the city's new Control Officer. Re-work the sentences and imagery in the local newspaper to change the fate of the town, in a language-based puzzle game.
A game about censoring is a language puzzle game. As the city's new Control Officer, your daughter is lightly threatened by the mayor to make her look good. Blackout boxes can be applied over images in the local newspaper, to re-shape the events in the local town.
The theme of the 2026 VGGJ was "mask." We brainstormed multiple game ideas, but, since we both prefer puzzles, we went for masking and censoring text.
The biggest challenge with this game was juggling the writing (and therefore, puzzle) tasks between ourselves. Since the art was dependent on the puzzles being completed, I completed stages of the illustrations as we decided on the plot. Bernardo and I took turns revising lines and reviewing answers that became branches in the narrative. We also bounced puzzles off of Mark and other visitors.
The title screen for A game about censoring, featuring credits for Bernardo Vecchia Stein (aka Daniel Sidhion) for programming; Mark Autolovich for music and sound effects; and me, Angela Schmold, for art. We worked together to design and refine the game.
The style is inspired by some darker illustrators. I rendered the game using digital crosshatching. The bird figures are meant to be odd and unsettling, because of their facial structure. The newspaper images are all grayscale, which was an amazing time saver for a short jam.
The colours of the main village illustration was based off of my moodboard, which included little stone houses and towers shrouded in grass and earth. The neutral palette of greens, toned down oranges, browns and grey communicates the largely serious tone of the game. These colours are complemented with hits of bright colour, because it is not an entirely serious game.
What I wish I had more time for was for designing the layout for the newspaper. I was trying to implement columns, but the hierarchy and spacing was confusing for a number of players. What we noticed was that many players were unsure who the hero and antagonist were.
the process for creating the game
We started with the basic mechanic of covering up words in a newspaper, to move through the story. The structure of the plot was largely decided by what puzzles we could create, but we tried to craft a structure where everything either went completely right, completely wrong or ended neutrally. Points in either of these directions were added together, which defined the branches you were shown, including your final ending. Mark Autolovich talked with us about the features and feeling of the game, to produce music and sound effects that fit the mood.
the process for creating the visuals to the game
I started working from a moodboard, but quickly jumped into illustrating the core assets of the game. Once the main characters and introductory illustrations were complete, I created newspaper "photos" to populate the levels, as they were written.
Instructions for the player were tricky to get just right, in this time frame. This would definitely be something I'd focus on refining, moving forward with the project. We got a lot of great feedback from players at the Global Game Jam and online.
A drawer slides out, with differently shaped black bars. These pieces can cover the words, in specific patters, to create or stop event depicted in the newsletter.
lessons learned
The design of the newspaper was my biggest lesson, because many people were confused by it. The entire project highlighted the importance of good visual communication and player testing, which we did not have time for in this two day jam. Although rules (or straight lines) were criticized in design school, they may have helped separate headlines in an otherwise hastily designed newspaper layout.
Common confusions included not knowing who the Control Officer, the protagonist, or who the antagonist, Florence was. Graphic design and layout would be a much bigger focus, as it should be.
Many people tried to censor the name of the newspaper, which would make sense. We had a lot of variety of answers, which proved that play-testing would be essential to a puzzle game like this one. Things we hadn't even thought of were quite common.
Overall, people enjoyed playing this little jam game, and, often, people played it more than once! If you'd like to give it a try, the demo's available on my itch.io page.