At its best, any creative process can feel a bit like “playing” — where you’re not thinking about how you’re doing something, so much as the feeling it gives you when you do it. We really aspire to people in the Glitch community having that sense of play when discovering and creating things on the platform. So it’s a particular delight to see game developers using Glitch to build their newest creations, especially games like goodbye.monster, which has earned an Independent Games Festival nomination in the Best Student Game category.

goodbye.monster is something special, a reflection on digital pets, and the larger cultural and emotional connections we have with them. It’s an unusual exploration, centered on themes like grief and loss and mortality that we don’t often see explored in gaming in general, and definitely not a the context that the co-creators explain was directly inspired by experiences like Neopets or Nintendogs.

In this interview with the team ahead of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), they talk a good bit about process, including one part that’s close to our hearts:

We often say that our game engine is the browser! goodbye.monster is built in JavaScript using Node.js for our server and svelte as our frontend framework. For hosting and prototyping, we relied on glitch.com, which let us have multiple versions of the game live for testing at once in addition to making it easier to share and remote pair program together—not all of us were strong programmers when we started!

And that’s it! That’s exactly the kind of thing Glitch is about — people creating unexpected, surprising things, even if they’re not experts at every part of the technical process, and all the while maintaining a sense of play and discovery while doing so.

We’re wishing the goodbye.monster team lots of luck for the ceremony this week, but they’re already winners in our book, having made something that’s unexpected and full of heart. We hope they keep playing on Glitch, and we hope all of you play goodbye.monster too. 👾