Keeping Dreamseeds

"Let tiredness and darkness engulf you. Learn how to move through the spirit world of seeds and find a path for I-Remnunt."

Keeping Dreamseeds: The Death of the Antin is a interactive speculative fiction about cooking, dreaming and saving seeds. Play as D'lo, a grower and a chef, who has been tasked with finding a path for her settlement, I-Remnunt, after the death of one of their key crops; the antin. Explore the deserted ruins of a deserted London in the deep future through D'lo's diary and find clues to help you navigate a dreamseed ceremony and communicate with seed spirits. Find recipes from magical insects, read about ingredients that helped humanity through difficult times and find future recipes for your settlement.

This world building in this story is based on Black feminist principles, decolonial relational philosophy, and Indigenous American ecological wisdom. The work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Édouard Glissant, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Rowen White are central to the story, and so I give thanks for their work. This story actively tries to imagine a society grounded in collective love for one another, for one's environment, for all the more-than-human animals in one's environments, and most importantly, love for food.

This game is intended to be played on a custom e-reader/camera hybrid I've made. This means it's coded in openFrameworks, which was quite a hassle. Below is a digital port of the game that can be interacted with the following controls.

Go slow with the game, take your time exploring the world through D'lo's sleepy eyes... 

Controls:

Up and down scroll the text

A: enter and make decisions with

B: make decisions with

C: make decisions with

Space Bar: panic button (returns you to the menu if you get stuck)

Note: Please go slow in the game, both for the sake of the story, but also because of my shoddy coding. If you get stuck somewhere, don't worry, its me, not you, just press the space bar to return to the menu and then try again.

Dreamseed soundtrack:

There is no official soundtrack, but these are some tracks that capture the slow pace of life in I-Remnunt:

Priscilla Ermel — Origens Da Luz (I listened to this on repeat for my main writing days!) Get it here: https://music-from-memory.bandcamp.com/album/origens-da-luz

Kukud’ Emampondweni — Found at sea (This album is the sound of the dreamseed ceremony) Get it here: https://foundatseamusic.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-sounds-in-a-new-world

‘Mangoanana — Beautiful field recordings of people playing the Lesiba from Lesotho (sadly artist is unknown) Get it here: https://swp-records.bandcamp.com/album/lesotho-calling

Sun Ra — Sleeping Beauty, Space is the Place (The sleeping beauty album is the mood of I-Remnunt in spring. Sleepy and dreamy. Space is the Place inspired the opening ceremony text — inner space is the place here though) Get them here: https://sunrastrut.bandcamp.com/album/sleeping-beauty and here: https://sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/space-is-the-place

Lucy over Lancashire — Paul Rooney (A 16 minute epic about the devilish sprites in Lancashire and dub music - the sprites are a close relative of the piskits in the world of I-Remnunt) Get it here: https://owdscratrecords.bandcamp.com/album/lucy-over-lancashire-remastered-2017-...

Rajma Swaminathan — Peregination (feat. Anjna Swaminathan) (Beautiful, dreamy Indian Classical music inspired by Glissant) Get it here: https://rajnaswaminathan.bandcamp.com/album/of-agency-and-abstraction

Matana Roberts — Invocation (This inspired the opening of the dreamseed ceremony) Get it here: https://matana-roberts.bandcamp.com/album/coin-coin-chapter-two-mississippi-moon...

Laraaji — All Pervading (20 minutes of spirit dreaming music) Get it here: https://soundsoftheuniverse.com/sjr/product/edward-larry-gordon-celestial-vibrat...

Credits: 

the fonts used in this game are both from the wonderful typographer lazy_dog.ttf

Check out their work on instagram - it's amazing! 

The programming is done on all open-source software and hardware: Ink, openFrameworks, Raspberry Pi's running Linux, and Arduino.

Special thanks go to ofxFontStash by armadillu which allowed me to get laz_dog.ttf's wonderful fonts onto the Raspberry Pi.