Our memory
2019 - 2020
Project objectives
Development of a text role-playing game about the events of WW2 in two formats - visual novel and chat bot
Project description
The role-playing text game allows to immerse into military everyday life, evaluate what is happening, repeating the life path of the chosen character or making your own choices, to feel emotions of people who had to subject themselves to bodily and moral tests regardless of the side of the conflict, gender, race, political views and religious beliefs.
A game using a chat bot is a simulator of life in war, a psychodrama based on the game principle: by “living” different situations a person realizes new problems, ways of their reaction, attitudes towards events, values, specific people, opens up new opportunities to build relationships in the present life and forms a new perspective at the past, attempting to find ways to overcome traumatic experience.
Project outcomes
Using the Python language, a role-playing text game was created on the Ren'Py engine and a chat bot in Telegram. The game plot is based on real events and memoirs of a Wehrmacht soldier Eberhard von Hoksleden.
In June - October 1941, he participated in military actions on the Eastern Front together with his unit on the Soviet Union territory (Belarus, Russia and Ukraine nowadays), which he wrote about in details in his diary.
The gameplay involves a moral system based on the player’s ability to influence the character’s choice in various life situations. Obtaining points leads to varied consequences in key story points, which, in turn, creates conditions for repeated gameplay, deeper awareness and thoughtful experience living through military events. Link to bot in Telegram @OUR_MEMORY_bot
The project became one of the winners of the international historical hackathon #hack4history held in Minsk and organised within the "Teaching History 4.0" project supported by the German Federal Foreign Ministry.