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Plan out your day and use your brain's resources without exhausting yourself
This was my first project at HKU's Minor Interactive Narrative Design. It was a two person project, together with a 2D animator that wasn't experienced with game development, and I ended up being the only one working in Unity, while she provided me with the art for it. Her style wasn't usually pixel art, but after I showed her some of mine, she insisted we do this project in pixel art, so that I could tweak the art I received from her whenever I wanted to as well.
The start of the project had some hiccups, namely that we created the concept for a completely scrapped project named Project Punch, a visual novel telling the story of a girl taking part in her first eSports tournament, for which I also made a whole new concept for an in-universe fighting game, also named Project Punch, which was also scrapped. She didn't have much motivation for the topics, so we ended up sitting down and revising the whole concept, until we realized that both of us had busy schedules that we constantly had to keep up with, and that really tired us out, so we decided we should make a game that simulates that feeling.
Time Waits for No One
Time Waits for No One
The first thing I worked on was a scrolling agenda bar, meant to simulate the time always going forward, and never stopping to give you a break. I didn't use any kind of smart art to get this to happen, I just made what is most likely the tallest image I'll ever use in a UI-based game, and then each of the individual time slots had their own properties that moved along with the big image.
Preset Activities
Preset Activities
Next I made the activities; menu items that look like Google Calendar events, that automatically snapped to spaces that they could fit into when the player drags it into one. At first I had an idea to make some events overlappable, but that fell out scope pretty quickly as I realized how much goes into just snapping something with an adjustable size to a grid. Every time you try to place an activity inside one of the slots, it has to check whether or not the activity fits there, which it does by checking the size of the activity itself against the amount of free spaces below the slot it's placed in.
Building Up Stress
Building Up Stress
Next in line was the brain machines; whenever you do an activity in a day, that activity takes some energy, and the brain machines is this game's personification of that energy being spent. The player has to manually turn these machines on and off, but if one gets left on for too long, it breaks down, and can't be used for a little bit, because at that point that part of the brain is overworked. Energy is also gained back much slower than it is spent, just like how in real life you need 8 hours of sleep to be able to function in day to day life. Failing to use the brain machines on time means you fail an activity, and waste time.
Tutorial Section
Tutorial Section
In playtests, people really struggled to grasp what they needed to do, being overloaded with the machines and the moving agenda and all the different activities popping up, so instead of just having a menu where you can click start or having a lengthy text tutorial that players won't read anyway, I made a small tutorial during the "night" sections, where the only activity for the brain is to wake up before the agenda reaches the "Return to Main Menu" activity. This worked quite well for most playtesters, though I didn't have time to implement something to help those who didn't quite grasp the machines mechanic.
Forcing Unhealthy Decisions
Forcing Unhealthy Decisions
In the final level, the player is forced to actively push back their sleep, or else fail to complete all the tasks of the day on time. This is often what happens in real life for us too, and that was the main inspiration for this game.
(sorry for the poor quality, gifs on Google Sites don't allow more than 50 MB)
The original idea for this concept was to have a whole week worth of days to play through, and me and my co-creator weren't exactly on the same page when it came to how much the game should have cutscenes; the ones she made are quite long, so I wouldn't blame you for skipping through them if you do play it yourself. Despite that though, I'm pretty fine with how this turned out. I feel like if we came up with this concept first, and didn't waste time on the two scrapped projects, the game would have seen more testing, and that would've helped with the pacing and tutorials, but I feel I still managed to make it pretty interesting, challenging and fun, while still being a bit stressful, as was intended.
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