Postcard Through Time

CONTROLS: Spacebar to continue dialogue, Left mouse click drag for puzzles.

Your "Getting to Know Singapore" essay is due tomorrow! It's Sunday. You haven't written a word.

Digging through your father's history book, you find something else instead:  old postcards, each scrawled with a poem and a place. One is torn to pieces. The moment you piece it back together, the room dissolves... and you're standing in Bukit Batok, decades before you were born!

There, you meet a father and son of opposing ideal. You just wanted the facts for your essay. What you find is something else entirely...

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A Visual Novel inspired by Edwin Thumboo's poem, "Evening by Batok Town" for NUS Library's Game Jam

--> The concept of the game was developed from how Thumboo was able to encapsulate periods of time so vividly within his poetry, almost 'bringing you back in time' to older Singapore. In particular, his poem "Evening by Batok Town" highlighted a conflict between Singapore of the past and Singapore of the future in the constantly modernizing state of the country, with how many youths focus on job competition that Singapore's history is not remembered until one stops and allow their thoughts to drift. In a way, his poetry becomes one of those ways to preserve and remember the past. This became the main theme of Postcards Through Time's story!

Credits: 

Elish and Mich

External Resources:

• Music/Ambience by DOVA-SYNDROME. 
• The Edwin Thumboo Private Papers Collection. NUS Libraries Digital Gems.
• Code Assistance from the YouTube Videos: YouTube Video "HOW TO MAKE A VISUAL NOVEL IN UNITY - FULL COURSE TUTORIAL - FOR BEGINNERS" by Jimmy Vegas, YouTube Video "Unity typing text effect for dialogue | Unity tutorial" by Shaped by Rain Studios
• Article "Through His Eyes: Remembering Old Singapore Through the Poems of Edwin Thumboo" by Stephanie Pee
• AI Usage: Claude is used for the debugging of the Unity Script