Dream Data: Making Data Entry Surreal

After a hiatus from jams to focus on Fail to Win, I decided to take a break and try another jam, the Dream Diary Jam #4. The jam was for fan games of Yume Nikki, a dream explorer game. To switch things up, though, I decided to stay a bit from the Yume Nikki structure. In Yume Nikki and most fan games, there isn't much to do in the waking world except write in your journal to update your save. With Dream Data, I wasn't to explore the idea of the waking world and the dream world affecting each other.

In Dream Data, there are 10 days. At the start of each day, you go to work at your new job doing data entry. Once you finish a few simple extraction tasks, you go home and sleep. When you find a new bed in your dream, you wake up and are ready to start the new day. But the things you see at work begin to show up in your dreams, and other dream elements manifest themselves in the waking world as brief hallucinations. This gets progressively more noticeable as the game continues and your character starts to lose his mind.

It was a lot of fun to work on, and I may update it with more random effects and areas later. It was a fun excuse to be weird and nonsensical, but I also tried to capture many of the universal themes that most people experience in their dreams. Enjoy!