In Armenian symbology, the Daghdaghan is a hand-carved wooden amulet believed to provide protection by warding off evil. Traditionally they would be hung at the entrance to houses, stables, placed in pots and pans, even hung around the necks of cattle or worn as jewellery.

They would be made by artisanal craftsmen, the craft passed down over the generations. While they work, craftsmen would have to ensure they only have positive thoughts and avoid any negative thoughts, as it was believed that the feelings of the craftsmen would be transmitted to the new owner through the amulet.

I wanted to create a game that would allow players to encounter and experience this unique tradition and get to know the people that engage in it.

Gameplay

You play as an adventuring hiker who comes across a village in the mountains close to nightfall. A villager meets you and rushes you towards shelter, warning that it is not safe to be out in the wilderness at night. She hands you an amulet, a dgdgan, which you must hang above the entryway of the home you shelter in to ward away the tiny creatures that threaten the night.

Spend your days collecting resources to keep the amulet-maker happy and working and distribute the amulets among the village homes when they are ready to keep the villagers and yourself safe.

Day / Night Cycle

The gameplay features two distinct modes differentiated by the day cycle and the night cycle.

Day

Explore the village, gather wood from the sacred tree or fruits from the orchard. Drop off the fruit for cutting at one of the village homes and deliver the cut fruit to the amulet-maker to keep him thinking those happy thoughts needed to make effective amulets. Drop off the wood at the amulet-makers workshop and collect the amulets to distribute them among the village homes before night falls.

Night

Take shelter in one of the homes that have been protected with an amulet. Otherwise, the creatures in the night will get you and the game will end. For now, the night is about being immersed in the atmosphere, but in the next iteration of the game, you will be able to converse with the different villagers that live in the different homes, to get to know them, their lives, their relationships and their culture.

Cultural Dimensions

The game is intended to provide players with an experience of parts of the Armenian culture, expressed through the following ways:

• The traditional cultural dress of the greeting villager

• The lore behind the amulets, how they are made, how they are used etc.

• Fruit as a means of expressing care: providing cut fruit as a means of showing care and love to someone is common in Armenian and similar cultures

• Communal care: In such a small village, people take care of each other and there is a strong sense of everyone looking out for one another. There are individual relationships and tensions, but the overarching goal is care for one another. Each person has their different roles and responsibilities as well as their own individual goals and aims and the game is intended to capture this.

Future Development

• Villager conversations. Add more villager characters all with their own stories and dynamics that can be discovered during the night mode.

• More activities to engage in during the daytime - more resources to collect, more ways to keep the amulet-maker happy.

• Amulet effects. A key superstition of these amulets is that when they are made, the maker needs to be thinking positive thoughts. In future iterations, it would be useful to implement a system that takes on board the amulet-maker's mental state, from a scale of positive to negative, and applies an effect on each amulet made based on the maker's mental state.