Sugarbaker Games came together as three friends bonding over a weird, little passion project, and that passion project will become a very real-world game in just a couple of months.
I Still Dream of My Father began as SBG founder Andy Gmitter’s brainchild; a result of many hours of isolation during The Plague of 2020. The concepts of how deeply our relationships with our parents can affect us, and how long we can carry any baggage from them forward in our lives created the foundation for a unique emotional experience. Pitching the idea to long-time gaming buddies Clara Tracey and Amie Tracey resulted in an enthusiastic (one might even say feverish) flow of ideas and iterations…and so I Still Dream of My Father was born.
The form and details of the game evolved over the course of a year in which we all struggled with the results of isolation: uncertainty, depression, and anxiety. Sometimes anger. Self-doubt. A fear of going mad. Uncannily similar emotions to what many of us struggle with when our relationships with our parents is…less than one would hope. I Still Dream of My Father is about opening that box and exploring it, rather than trying to bury it where we think we will never encounter it again.
I Still Dream of My Father is a single-player, card based role-playing game in which the player steps into the role of someone trying to come to terms with a Very Damned Difficult relationship with their father. Play progresses over the course of 10 rounds, during which the character encounters both real life and dream situations and must make choices about how to respond. Every choice bears consequences, and the consequences directly affect the character’s ability to navigate the mental reckoning at the end of the game.
Extensive effort was put into both the story and the visuals of the game itself. While not intended as therapy, I Still Dream of My Father does aim to emotionally engage the player on a deep level, and the fact that the story itself is told via the medium of cards proved an interesting challenge, in terms of how to actually tell a compelling story while working with a small space. The solution was found in the combination of an almost poetic sensibility in the cadence of the storytelling and rich visual formatting which conveys shades of information not always found in the words, themselves.
I Still Dream of My Father will be launching in January 2022 on Kickstarter with the hope of bringing it to a wider audience of people who are looking for an unusual game with rich, emotionally engaging content. We at Sugarbaker Games are super excited (and a little scared!) to have this chance to share our vision with all of you. If you want to be notified when it launches, please sign up for our mailing list so we can let you know!