The Fate of the Vivaldi
On a routine voyage across the sound, the ferry Vivaldi goes mysteriously off-course, and unremarkable passenger Rosalie must find out what's going on before everyone on the ship meets a watery grave.
The Fate of the Vivaldi is a short horror adventure game made for Beregon's RPG Maker Horror Game Jam #14: Endless Ocean.
Controls: Move using the arrow keys or mouse. Space, Enter, or left click to interact with people and objects. The X key or right mouse button opens and closes the menu.
Content Warning: This game contains violence and death, but nothing particularly gory or graphic. The entire game takes place on a ship, and the deaths are water-related, so only play the game if you are not averse to the ocean.
Developer's Postmortem:
I had grand ambitions for this game jam, but unfortunately I joined a few weeks late, and then got sick two weeks before the deadline, so I did not have as much time as I hoped for, and it met with the fate that so many jam games meet.
The game does have an ending, and can be played through from beginning to end in about 15 minutes. With that said, I had to rush the second half of the game a bit to get to the point where the ending was accessible. As a result, there are some elements that were dropped, and the whole thing feels a bit inconclusive.
The only assets that I made before the jam started were the "balloon" animations, which are reused from my larger project, Lamia's Fun Vacation, and the jellyfish photo on the title screen, which I took at the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut way back in 2017. There are also a handful of RPG Maker stock assets. Everything else was made during the jam period.
The ship and all the characters are named after either real ghost ships or people who disappeared mysteriously at sea. The ferry itself is inspired by the real ferries which run between Bridgeport, CT and Port Jefferson, NY, which I used to take sometimes to visit family on Long Island.
In order to save time on character art and allow myself to draw more characters, I decided to use a colored silhouette art style for the characters, inspired by Kamaitachi no Yoru, which I think is one aspect of the game that did work out fairly well - although maybe it doesn't quite match with the style of the map tiles.
I didn't have time to write a lot of music for the game, so there isn't much sound except for on the title screen.
I wanted to also add downloadable versions for various platforms, but due to unexpected technical issues while uploading the HTML version, I ran out of time to do this, so at the moment, the in-browser version is the only version. Luckily, it should run on most platforms just fine.
Anyway, all of that is to say, every game jam is an experiment and a source of experience for the developers, but they rarely turn out exactly the way one might hope. Thanks for checking out the game!
Update 2/23/26: I've added downloadable versions of the game for Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile (Android/iOS.) However, not every version has been tested yet.
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Comments
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This was so cool!! I love the ocean and also grew up on a lot of ferries. So creepy, good luck for the future in finishing it!
I just watched your video! Thanks for all the feedback! So cool to have someone who knows ferries play my game about a ferry. The ferries that I based it on are the ones that cross the Long Island Sound - a lot of bodies of water that separate barrier islands from the mainland are called sounds.
Re: the bathroom, that is just kind of a red herring - there aren't any other events that you missed in the bathroom. I just wanted an extra little creepy event for flavor since I didn't have time to implement a lot of good scares. But seeing you and my playtester get thrown off by it, that's probably something I should add a bit more to if I do decide to go back and add more to the game. Right now, I'd consider it "done" since it is a game jam game, but maybe there's enough there to make it worth revisiting.