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our mainscreen
Inspiration
Imagine waking up and not recognizing the person sitting beside your bed. For tens of millions of people living with dementia, that’s an ordinary morning. And for the loved ones who visit, every conversation is a guess. Will he know me? Should I bring up the good times, or the hard ones?
This year’s theme was “Revitalize,” so we asked ourselves: what if you could bring a relationship back to life using music, one note at a time? Music can reach people with dementia when other memories fade, and that became the heart of our game.
What it does
Memento is a 2D visual novel set in a hospital room in a world void of color. You play an elderly man with dementia who, over three days, has three visitors: his ex-wife, his old jazz partner, and his daughter. In every conversation, you choose how he responds, with a warmer answer or a deeper, sadder one, and you don’t know which is which. Your choices change the visitor’s mood, the room, and the music. Each visitor also has a page in his journal, full of photos and notes that don’t tell you what to feel.
Every choice adds a piece to a melody, and by the end the player has built the song from their own decisions. As each relationship is rebuilt, color returns to his world.
For the hackathon, we finished a full demo of Day 1: the nurse’s morning check-in, the ex-wife’s visit, and the nurse’s final check-in when visiting hours end.
How we built it
We built Memento in Godot, using Git and GitHub for source control. All of the characters and objects are hand-drawn, and the title screen was made in Canva. The music was composed by Hosanna, with our main melody written in three versions: a neutral one, a warmer one in a major-feeling key, and a bitter one that shifts the mood. We split the work so each teammate owned a different part of the game: art, code, music, and story and dialogue.
Challenges we ran into
Staying functional on very little sleep over 36 hours Deciding what to cut to keep our scope realistic, which is why we finished one full day instead of three half-finished ones Debugging that took longer than expected Making sure all our brainstormed ideas (the choices, the music, the room’s colors, the journal) fit together the way we pictured them
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We delivered a finished, working demo in the time we had, and we’re proud of how the story and the music work together. Because our team had already taken a game development course together over the summer, we knew each other’s strengths going in, and we didn’t waste time.
What I learned
We learned how to blend each teammate’s skills into one project, and how much teamwork, communication, and time management matter under a deadline. Individually, we picked up GDScript, writing branching dialogue where every choice has to matter, and organizing assets so the whole team could keep moving.
What's next for Memento
We’ll build out Day 2 (the old jazz partner) and Day 3 (his daughter), so the eight pieces of the song can come together into the full melody and ending. We’d also like to deepen the journal and the room’s color changes.
Built With
- canva
- dotgd
