Tietäjä: Finnish folk tales as a point-and-click game

A painted village scene in soft dawn light: two log houses, spruces and a lake behind them, a girl in a red skirt by a cold ring of hearth stones, an old woman with a stick by the door, and the verbs Look at, Pick up, Use and Talk to under the picture — The game itself: click to play it right here. Full screen

Tietäjä is a small point-and-click adventure I made to try out Bevy, Rust’s game engine, and WebAssembly, in the style of the old LucasArts adventures like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island: verbs at the bottom, click on things, combine items. It’s three short tales from Finnish folklore: Vilja has to sing a dead fire back to life, make peace with an offended sauna spirit, and find the fox whose tail lights the northern lights. It runs natively and in the browser, phones included: the box above is the real game.

The story is a text file

Each tale is one file with its characters, items, rooms, hotspots and dialogue. Clicking “Look at” on the hearth runs the node look_hearth; flags in brackets pick which lines play:

node look_hearth
  [fire_lit] Vilja: It's burning happily. I did that.
  [!fire_lit] Vilja: Cold ashes. Not a single ember left.

Writing a puzzle is writing a few nodes. The Rust side (about 4,000 lines) parses the file and runs it: walking, verbs, inventory, dialogue choices, crossfades between rooms.

Art and music from scripts

There isn’t a hand-drawn pixel in it. A Python script with Pillow paints every room, character and item, in the manner of Werner Holmberg’s landscapes: golden side light through spruces, sandy roads, hazy distances. Rooms are 320×144, painted at four times that.

The music is a synthesized kantele (plucked strings, Karplus–Strong) playing runo-song style melodies: five notes of a minor scale in 5/4. Characters “talk” in short synthesized syllables at random pitches, like Animal Crossing.

Small enough for a phone

The browser build loads WebP art and only one tale at a time, and every deploy versions its files so browsers don’t keep an old copy. The second tale opens on October 31, the third on November 6.