The Cremation of Sam McGee
A downloadable Poem for Windows and macOS
This project is based on the poem 'The Cremation of Sam McGee' by Robert W. Service (1907). The art style is heavily derived from the work of Ted Harrison, and his collection of paintings which share the poem's namesake. The narration is derived from a reading by Johnny Cash on the NPR from 2006 (while the delivery has some errors, it's by far my favourite reading of the text).
This is not a game, but rather a narrative experience to engage with one of my favourite pieces of poetry. It only takes a few minutes to finish, perhaps only a couple more than listening to a reading of the source text. It was proudly developed in the Unreal 4 Engine, and primarily features assets collected from Epic Game's various package releases. All audio is retooled from freesound.org, and the music track is an altered version of KatMaestro and dem0lecule's 'Frozen River' from NewGrounds.
This project can be used freely for educational purposes, but cannot be redistributed for profit in any way.
Controls:
Movement - WASD/Joystick
Interact - E/Left Face Button
Pause - ESC/Start
Thanks for playing!
Download
Install instructions
This game is very easy to install and play - just unzip the files in the directory to the same location and launch the executable. It is a packaged Unreal 4 project so there really isn't anything beyond that.
Comments
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I had never heard of an interactive poem, and this was a great way to be introduced to it. Very cool, I'm definitely inspired!
Gave it a go...
Loved the game ;)
I never heard this poem!
I really liked it, though. And this was a really neat way to share the poem too. I'm really glad my first exposure to it was in this game you made, it was nice, and Sam was so cute!
I made a Lumps Play.
Lumps Plays utilizes pop-up commentary. If you're looking for something new and different in your let's plays, gimme a go and tell your friends.
Absolutely marvelous! Horrific art design, intelligent choice not to let the player wander off too quickly once the reading kicks in and what a great poem this is! One little nitpick I have though: It would have been cool to be able to play the different parts multiple times instead of having to start all over again. But where is the fun in that, right?
It's a nice experience :)
Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
A macOS build please?!
I'm away from my desk for the next few days but I'll look into cranking one out when I'm back home!
I've posted a mac build now! To be absolutely honest I have no idea how well it'll work given that I have very limited resources to test on the system. I lowered the quality specs significantly for the default setting, but the standard 'High' setting is accessible through the menu as well if you happen to have some monster computer that can run it.
I hope you enjoy it!
Thanks Nick! I'll let you know once I play later today.
Looks like the Dropbox link is expired now... See: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m6h7wfgeeu4xcny/expired.png?dl=0
Now dropbox is against me? Not cool. I put up another link, and I'll look into a more reliable option I suppose. What a learning experience this has been...
Newly compressed file up now. Can't do better than this!
👏🏻 YOU 👏🏻 BEAUTIFUL 👏🏻 HUMAN
Wow, I did not expect that.
Looking back, it feels like a de-horror remix of Prenumbra.