Missing Me
What happened to the sun?
A narrative RPG about a farmer whose emotional state is tied to the sun’s existence. The sun is currently absent, and your dying plants speak to you, asking that you go into town and interact with its people. Get the sun back to its rightful place!
Year: 2022
Role: Game Designer, UI Designer, Sound Designer
Tools: Procreate, Adobe Photoshop, Reaper
Mechanic Ideation
When ideating game features, it was important to connect the mechanics back to our depressed character. In order to represent how these feelings manifest accurately, we researched online and spoke to those around us who may be feeling the same way. One thing that stood out was how poor mental health can prevent us from doing the simplest of tasks. We wanted to apply this to our character and sent them on small quests. As a result, the game revolves around our character doing simple tasks, like buying a mold for your watermelon, or getting a new pair of overalls.
UI Design
As a more experienced UI designer, I wanted to push myself to create elements that helped portray the feelings of our main character and the personalities of side characters. I found that color was a great way to portray personality. For example, the tailor's chat bubbles were blue to communicate his calmness with the player. Since each crop is tied to a side character, the tailor's corresponding crop also had blue chat bubbles. This experience taught me the importance of color, and how it can shape the way we perceive things.
Something else that I worked on is differentiating the player's thoughts and speech. Most games communicate a person's thoughts by italicizing the words, and I chose to follow this convention to avoid confusing the player. Beyond typography changes, I moved the text box down only for the player's speech. Since all other characters have speech bubbles above their heads, it represents the idea that the main character might not see themselves on equal footing with everyone else.
