La Pensadera is a narrative strategy game inspired by the experiences of earthquake survivors.
You don’t fight monsters, you fight to keep moving forward. Every day brings new challenges: guilt, nostalgia, illness, hunger, loneliness, and painful memories. You won’t be able to deal with everything. You’ll have to choose what to face today and what must wait until tomorrow.
As you progress, you don’t replace your deck with stronger cards. Instead, your existing cards grow alongside you. Small habits, supportive relationships, community, and emotional tools gradually become stronger through experience.
The goal is not to erase grief. The goal is to learn how to carry it.
You can play online at https://slash.itch.io/la-pensadera and don’t forget to donate!
The Story
This morning I saw a days old post from a friend on Facebook which reminded me about these fundraising efforts for the weeks’ past Venezuela’ earthquakes disaster. It was a lighting gamejam, I wondered, maybe I can give it a shot?
As I took my morning shower, I wondered what could be a good idea- any game would probably do, since the main goal was to use your own audience to amplify the reach of the campaign in the end. But I thought it would make sense to have a game that properly fit the jam, a game with a purpose.
I was considering many options but then I thought: can I make a game that, in the unlikely event a survivor from the earthquake plays, it’s going to be somewhat useful for him, help them through these hard times even a little bit?
And so the idea grew on my, making a game about the mechanisms to help overcome the great challenges of recovering after a big tragedy.
It was a family-busy Sunday, but along the day I was iterating with the design in my phone, simplifying it, struggling to avoid trivializing the situation or transforming into a economy optimization issue. At one point, I decided to have as less stats as possible.
Transformation using claude + game design guidelines
To develop this game, I decided to use as a foundation an experiment I had done for a zombie apocalypse survival deckbuilder (which I still got to discuss a bit more in this blog).
My process, given the extremely short timeframe, was to write down a planning doc with multiple phases detailing the transformation, the new game mechanics, the change on scope, and the initial design for the cards. I couldn’t really iterate much in the design afterwards, but based on my gameplay tests, I think it already feels fine!
I think most of the iteration was in some spots that weren’t really clear to the player, UX holes that a human needed to spot, especially on the mobile responsiveness where I had to hint it in one or two places.
Another fantastic gain from using code was adding a Spanish localization, it was literally a single prompt and it build everything.
Code-wise, it currently pretty rough; the simplest possible structure, really: it’s a single HTML file I don’t even want to look at. However, it works great and that should do FOR THIS specific type of project that’s it. I believe this is yet another area where agent-assisted development helps thing happens that would otherwise not be possible when time is limited.
Unfortunately, this one shipped without graphics (at least for the initial version) since I still refuse to ship games with AI generated art. I still hope people can find the fun of it…. I think it’s a challenging game with something to learn!
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 