Amnios is a free narrative game about pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood during migration, built in Godot and co-created with migrant women, hospital clinicians, and the ICRC. This talk walks through how a research-creation methodology shaped the game’s narrative, art direction, and puzzle mechanics — and what it actually takes, technically and ethically, to turn lived testimony into a playable experience.
Most “games for good” struggle with the same tension: how do you build something emotionally honest without turning real suffering into spectacle, and without the production collapsing under its own good intentions? This talk uses Amnios — a hand-drawn 2D narrative game developed in Godot — as a concrete case study for navigating that tension from a technical and production standpoint. Amnios follows three women navigating pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood across three different displacement contexts (the Darién Gap, the DRC–Uganda border, and Geneva). It was developed by a small interdisciplinary team (HEAD – Genève, HEdS, HUG, ICRC) on an eight-month seed grant, using real testimonies and a co-creation workshop with twelve migrant women as source material rather than research statistics.
I’ll cover:
- Why Godot was the right engine for a small, cross-disciplinary team mixing artists, clinicians, and researchers with no prior game-dev experience
- Building a hybrid comic/side-scrolling structure — combining illustrated panel sequences with forced-scroll 2D levels to represent involuntary displacement
- “Bubble Puzzles”: a symbolic dialogue mechanic (conversation, thought, and violence bubbles) used as both a narrative device and a literal gameplay system, and how we implemented it in Godot’s node/signal architecture
- Translating testimony into mechanics — the practical pipeline from workshop transcripts and field interviews to level design and environmental storytelling, without reproducing individual stories directly
- Production reality on a tiny budget and timeline — team structure, scope decisions, what got cut, and what we’d do differently
- Ethical representation as a design constraint, not an afterthought: how clinical and humanitarian partners (obstetrics, perinatal psychiatry, ICRC field researchers) were embedded in the actual dev process, not just consulted at the end
Who this is for: developers and studios considering socially-engaged or research-based projects, anyone scoping a narrative game on a small team/budget, and educators or NGOs curious about games as a serious medium for sensitive topics. Attendees will leave with a concrete production framework for working with external experts and lived testimony without either exploiting the subject matter or diluting the game into something toothless. No prior knowledge of humanitarian work needed — this is a game-dev talk first, with the social impact angle as the lens.