The kids!
This is written on NOV 23th, 2025.
Current State of the Game
This week consisted of a lot of meetings, documenting, and mocking up various aspects of the game, so we are back to the list format!
What – Character Profiles
We have sat down together to form the personalities, beliefs, hobbies, and backstories for 5 out of 6 (we ran out of meeting time for the 6th one) of the main kids that the player will get to hang out with. The goal is to have their personalities down at least a bit, so it dictates how they speak, but also to have their beliefs down so that we know where they fall on the belief spectrum of what actually happened, so that the character could influence the player’s belief as the player interacts with them.
Caelan is a lot more experienced than me at creating character profiles, so I got to learn a lot about how to form different aspects of a character but also making sure that they form a connection and not just a mixture of interesting and too-perfect-to-be-human traits. We are trying to be careful of not placing any 9-year-olds stereotypes onto these characters, and to make them as believable and engaging as possible, giving them goods and flaws. Still, we both agree that these are definitely nowhere near the finalized character profiles as we will need playtests to see actually how believable they are to players and whether or not the spread of beliefs are balanced. Caelan also brought up a concern that they are still too perfect to be kids!
Art by @sseongryul
What – Map (This town is ~1000 in population)
We have a rough draft of the map of the town! And by rough I mean it is a sketch of the town drawn on a piece of paper, not particularly to any scale of real life. However, most importantly, this map shows where the key locations in the town are in relation to one another. This is going to be very useful going forward as we add more details to the narrative and craft the town in-engine.
The map is still going to probably change a bit from what we have now as we will need to go into more details about who exactly lives where (this will come with more work on character profiles), and I am going to digitize the map so that all the text is easily readable later.
Our Map
What – Designing the Rock Collection Feature
The Rock Collecting mechanic is our main vacation sim feature that is going to be balanced with the mystery investigation side of our game, keeping the experience playful and reminding the players that they are in the world as a child even with the deaths and mystery that occurred in the town.
The main interaction with the rocks is that players can click and drag rocks that are within proximity to drop it into their pouch (using physics). Through this, players can discover different types of rocks, and also organize them in their pouch as the pouch can be full. Caelan did the UI Wireframe for this!
What can players do with these rocks then? Currently, we have one interaction fleshed out for the use of rocks, which is Shrine Offering. Players can click and drag the rocks from the ground or from their pouch to the shrine, which then allows the rocks to be dropped onto the shrine area (using physics) as offerings. The rocks can be stacked, and players can also see what the other people in town have offered to the shrine.
Beside this Shrine Offering interaction, we are still listing out the possible interactions of the rocks that will serve our goal of the playfulness of vacation sim. These mechanics that we brainstormed include Rock Encyclopedia and Rock Museum, and Rock Village. We are still thinking about it and possibly adding more to this list because we think there are still some fun interactions that we haven't put down yet, and we will be ranking them based on how much we think it serves our goal. About how we will proceed, after finishing prototyping the Rock Collection Feature and Shrine Offering, playtesting them and deciding to add more, we will check back to the ranked list, see if that interaction leads us closer to our goal, and add that interaction in!
What – UI Wireframes for Stickers Messenger and Rock Collection
We have the UI wireframes for our 2 main features! It is part of the UX/UI class but it also helps us quickly establish the intended feeling of interacting with the UI, how it should work, and how it should look, especially for the Rock Collection which have been fleshed out later than the dialogue only this past week.
I was in charge of the wireframe for the sticker messenger chat, in which I have made 2 versions. Version 01 is a full screen interface of the messenger chat, in which the player can see the chat history. Version 02, on the other hand, is an in-world spatial UI in which the dialogue box pops up on top of the character’s head, and the sticker keyboard is smaller and at the bottom center of the screen, allowing the world of the game to be seen as players form their messages. After voting in class and also discussing with Caelan, we decided to go with an iteration of wireframe Version 02, where the chat box stacks upwards once, allowing players to see the chat history of 1 message before, while still feeling like being part of the world.
What – Art style research and decision making
In the process of doing the mockup, I did research in order to establish an art style for our game. What we have decided on currently is a hand-drawn, flat color with minimal rendering characters & interactables against a hand-painted, impressionistic, textured style for the background.
The painted backgrounds are drawn from Ghibli studios films and Marteusz Urbanowicz artworks, in order to create a space where the player feels like they can just exist, where time moves slowly with an almost dream-like and nostalgic feeling, inspired by the vacation sim games. As for the hand-drawn chibi characters, we want the feeling of a small child in a big world, hence the size of the character to screen size, but also being in a world that (started as) nothing will be able to harm them and that they are able to explore and play around.
Also, the art style for the sticker messenger UI will be of course inspired by the DS PictoChat, but also the y2k messaging services like MSN and ICQ. The goal of the UI art style is to emulate what the 2000s view as ‘futuristic’ and sleek interface and contrast that with y2k maximalist stickers.
Princess Mononoke, 1997
Moodboard for our sticker messenger UI
Next Steps
- Caelan is still working on the dialogue system – 2 iterations. They will be ready for playtesting some time next week!
- Jib is prototyping the Rock Collection feature in Unity, using a wireframe designed by Caelan.
- Jib is continuing working on the mockup in which shows the art style of the game, and what is or isn’t interactable.
- We will create the character profile for the last remaining kid!
- We will think more about rocks!
- We will workshop the name for the game. This will happen in class time!
Art by Marteusz Urbanowicz
~Personal thoughts Section~
Showcase is coming closer!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
But also,
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!