Kafka's original story is one exploring the psychology of alienation, both from society and from one's own family. Gregor, in the original story, is a character that feels little connection to the life he lives even before his transformation. The only connection he seems to hold to his job and his family is an obligation to get all of them out of debt and living comfortably. After his transformation into an insect, this alienation becomes a reciprocal relationship. However, as a gender queer American in 2025, still in the closet in many ways, my relationship with alienation is complex. It is also a reciprocal alienation where one side doesn't know it's reciprocating it; not because the desire to alienate isn't there, but rather the hatred is meant to hit everyone in hopes to affect even those they can't perceive. To be hated by a society that doesn't know it's you they hate means safety, but also loneliness and detachment; disassociation with your own life. This game exists as an expansion of Kafka's original themes by shaping them by this alternate experience of alienation. 

All of the assets in the game are hand drawn in Procreate except for the sewer manhole + tunnel sections, which were creative commons photos I put through a dithering filter.  I used a small canvas (usually around 100 x 100 pixels), and pixel brushes that only drew one pixel at a time. I wanted the game to be very visually simple, so I maintained a greyscale for the background and found interesting brush textures to keep it all lively and interesting. The only things that were drawn in color were the main characters, and the final sewer rooms. To do this, I picked a limited color palette of 5-10 colors for each character, and made sure they had similar undertones and saturation. 

The system that I used to code the game was the free version of the Gamemaker engine which uses Gamemaker Language (GML) . This language is similar to C, but easier with designated functions provided. Each room and object would change based off of a global variable "Act."