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What Stays Behind
What Stays Behind submitted to GIMJAM 2026 and was awarded Best Gameplay and Best Visual. Currently available in itch.io for Windows.
This project is done after the development of Cat Notes, and I could say that this game, What Stays Behind, have quite a resemblance with Cat Notes in the way the story is told through the rules of the stages in a form of a diary entry. However, due to the theme this game is following, the gameplay focuses on space management — making sure all required items fit into a set space in each stages.
Concept
The core concept of the game is following the story of the protagonist through occasional diary entries which ties in with some major events in the protagonist's life. There are also some minor details in some stages that imply some sort of optional choices that can affect how the story is perceived, such as putting an item into the bag over another. In some cases, the rules were written in a non-specific way where it doesn't explicitly state what items to bring, but rather what kind of it. Technically speaking, this is designed by creating tags for each items, and each rule in a stage requires a certain tag of items or a specific item. This gives players some restricted freedom on what they want to bring and what stays behind. The illusion of freedom, if you will, is designed to create an active participation and a form of immersion into the story, making the players have a sense of responsibility to the protagonist's story.
Level Design
Sample of the level design process using a paper-prototype approach.
The difficulty curve for this game is somewhat linear and straightforward, unlike Cat Notes. So naturally, the level design was not as complex as Cat Notes, since complexity can simply be added by adjusting the shape and sizes of the items and the bag. However, I still needed to line it up with the progression of the story, and each item needs to make sense with the situation given in the diary entry of a stage.
Narrative Beats through Gameplay
Other than the gameplay, the presence of multiple items in the game opens up plenty of room for visual storytelling.. On the other hand, the fact that items need to fit in with the story means that there are issues with how much visual assets we needed to make for the game. Because of it, I needed to design the levels and write the story in a way that it balances new items and reoccurring items. I made some items to be what the protagonist consider as precious, making it reappear in future stages. Other than that, there are also items that are simply recolors of previous ones, such as socks. This naturally reduces the need to make unique assets for stages. Of course, we didn't do this much since we still wanted to create items that have specific meaning in certain points of the story.