Introduction

My idea for senior thesis is to create a simple, story-oriented 2D rpg game. In this game, the players will play as NAME: a highschool senior not yet ready to go to college, or more specifically, not yet ready to be kicked out of the ‘teen’ circle. Seeing him acting up because of this, barely having passed his senior year, and not having gotten into a college…his parents decide to send him off to his grandparents’ home in the countryside for the 3-4 months of Summer to cool his head, get his act together, and hopefully ready to get into a university of some sort. The game will focus in on these 3-4 months of NAME’s life and the player will see NAME’s perspective on adulthood begin to change as he interacts with his grandparents and the friendly local (of varying ages) from this small countryside town. To serve as breaks between the chunks of dialogue and story, there will be small minigames here and there that simulate farm life and give players a better sense of the quiet, mundane but relaxing  atmosphere of the town. For example, this could be feeding barnyard animals, milking a cow, or running errands to the one general store the own has.

The main point of this game is to hopefully have players relate to and see from NAME’s maturation and change in perspective that becoming an adult isn’t you waking up one day suddenly all ready to pay the bills, being perfectly organized, anxiety “be gone”-ed, and all that jazz. Nor does adulting only look one way or have one definition. Because of this theme, I’m mainly writing this game with young adults in mind. I was personally inspired to do this main theme due to both personal experiences and stories from my friends of adjusting to college and slowly trying to, well, adult. That’s why I felt that young adults would benefit/relate to this game the most.

Context

I wouldn’t say that this game is ground-breaking in anyway, but I suppose one way it’d be unique is that the character wouldn’t mature into a new person. Sure, over the 3-4 months, NAME will mature as a character in some aspects, however, the him at the beginning of the game and the him at the end of the game won’t be too different. Like, he’s not gonna suddenly have his life all together. However, he will be able to handle them better. I mainly wanted it ot be like this to show that the you in highschool is probably the you that you’re gonna be in college which will be the you as an adult. Sure, you’d grow in some areas. But will you stop liking Pokemon as say, a gramps/grandma because you’re gonna wake up one day and think it’s suddenly super childish? No. No you are not. Same with college. I have procrastinated a heck ton throughout life. I thought by the time I was a senior in college, I’d have been able to pull myself together and be ultra productive, no more procrastinating and a A+ sleep schedule. Didn’t happen. However, just because that’s the case doesn’t make me less of an adult. It’s just that it didn’t match my image of an adult at first. However, I learned through growing myself as well as watching my senior friends and my parents being absolute messes at times helped me to realize that my definition of being an adult was wrong.

Technical Strategy

In terms of software, I plan on making the entire game in Unity. As for art assets and animations, I plan on making them in Clip Studio Paint as that’s the program I use the most and am most familiar with. I am pretty confident in my art skills and I have an idea for the style I want to make everything in already, so I don’t think the arting would be too hard. The same can be said for animation as I also have experience with 2D animating and the animation I’m planning to do in the game is minimal/simple. As for story writing, I suppose I’m decent at it, however, I don’t have any experience doing long stories as my previous experience was making short comics for fun/personal reasons. I’ll most likely have to brush up on my writing skills and borrow the eyes of some peers I know who are better storytellers than me to get the game to the point I’d like. Lastly, coding is the skill I’m least confident in compared to the other skills listed. I have some past experience coding both in and out of class, however, so luckily I’m not a complete beginner. The bar isn’t set too high either as my game’s mechanics are very simple and few (mainly keyboard clicking and mouse clicks and drags). However, I will definitely need to review and study coding for this project.

Aesthetic Strategy

As for stylistically, I was planning on making the game have a simplistic, painted look, so that it’s not too much on the eyes. For the same reason, I wanted to keep the UI incredibly simple and minimal as well (UI shown in the image below is not definite, might change a little). Because I am terrible at describing styles, below is an example (also not 100% definite, might change or clean up some things) with 2 characters from the game (Liz and Player).