Laugardagr

🏆 We won Best Graphics, Best Audio, and 2nd Overall!! 🏆

🧼Laugardagr🛁

This game was created by a band of rad friends who brought you SpyJinks 19 for last year's HAGJ9! 

We were inspired by the Vikings' hygienic practices and daily grooming rituals, and we focused our research and game on our findings. 

In this game, you play as a Viking man getting ready for the day on Laugardagr through bathing, dying and combing out your hair and beard, and putting on freshly laundered clothing.

We pulled references and inspiration from historical books, poems, and photographs of ancient Nordic and Viking artifacts and sites. Sources listed below.

📖Historical Research📖

To the Vikings, being clean and well-dressed were important parts of their lives. Each person had a personal comb, considered to be a "universal possession", and their combs were buried alongside them in their graves. They made soap from tallow and lye to wash, as well as lye-based hair bleach and hair dyes to lighten their hair color or dye it a reddish tone. They also had tools such as scissors and tweezers. 

Dress was also very important to them, and they enjoyed brightly colored and embroidered fabrics as well as any rings or jewelry. The men's overtunic - called kyrtill - were constructed very efficiently where little fabric went to waste and allowed for a wide range of movement. Most tunics were decorated with braid around the neckline and cuffs. Kyrtill created for the wealthy sometimes had silk trims with silver thread embroidery. 

Records of early Icelandic laws also show that there were harsh penalties for throwing dirt on another person or causing them to become unpresentable. To the vikings, cleanliness, personal hygiene, and dressing well was a point of dignity, as demonstrated by a passage in the Havamal which states,

“Washed and fed a man should ride to the Assembly
Though he may not be very well-dressed,
of his shoes and breeches he should not be ashamed,
nor of his horse, though he doesn’t have a good one.”

Laugardagr was the weekly day of bathing and washing their clothes, but records show that the Vikings also had daily morning rituals where they cleansed and groomed themselves as a way of honoring their gods. They had daily sponge baths and hair combing in the morning to prepare for the day. The Eddic poem Reginismal mentions,

“Combed and washed every thoughtful man should be
And fed in the morning
For one cannot see where one will be in the evening
It is bad to rush headlong before one's Fate." 

♨️Team Clean♨️

💻Cesar - Programming, Game Design
🎧Christian - Audio Design
💻Hikari - Programming, Shaders, UI Programming
🎨Katlynn - Environmental Design, Illustration 
🎨Miranda - Character Art, Concept Art, UI Art

This game was created for the Historically Accurate Game Jam 11.

Thank you for playing and happy HAGJ!

- ♨️Team Clean♨️

✨Disclaimer✨

No pre-made/free/AI-generated code/assets were used to create this game.
All art assets, audio assets, and code were created by the team members in 7 days for the Historically Accurate Game Jam 11..

📜Sources📜

Vaughan, Richard. “The Chronicle of John of Wallingford.” The English Historical Review, vol. 73, no. 286, Jan. 1958, pp. 66–77, https://doi.org/10.1163/2213-2139_emc_sim_01543. 

AUDEN, W. H. Havamal Words of the High One. KESSINGER PUBLISHING, 2010. 

Archive, Internet Sacred Text. “The Poetic Edda: Reginsmol | Sacred Texts Archive.” Internet Sacred Text Archive, 1936, sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe23.htm.

Laws of Early Iceland. Univ. of Manitoba Press, 27 Sept. 2014.

Price, N. Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. Basic Books, New York, 2020.

Short, W. R. Health, Grooming, and Medicine in the Viking Age. Hurstwic. 2021. Hurstwic: Health and Medicine in the Viking Age

Short, W. R. Health, Clothing in the Viking Age. Hurstwic. 2021. Hurstwic: Clothing in the Viking Age

“Viking Hairstyles.” YouTube, uploaded by Kaptorga - Visual History, 12 July 2018, Viking Hairstyles.