Sunflower

A retrospective into a personal depression episode. 

My midterm project, Sunflower, is a retrospective game that looks back on my depression episode I went through last fall. It was probably the most difficult experiences I’ve ever experienced in my life before, so I thought it would be interesting to test my artistic limits and see if I could express these same emotions through my work. I’ve never attempted working on a serious game before, so this was definitely quite the challenge for me as a designer.  In the game, the player plays as myself walking through the streets of New York collecting important artifacts that had influence on my episode, whether good or bad. As the player collects these artifacts, I give a monologue on the item and how it influenced my episode and the environment slowly gets more colorful from the greyscale colors present at the start of the game. The song “Sunflower” by Post Malone radiates from these artifacts drowning out the background music of “Slow Dancing in the Dark” by Joji. “Sunflower” was a song that helped a lot in getting my spirits back up and being able to enjoy myself once again, so because of this it is a main focal point of this game.

            The process of making this game was difficult, yet still doable. Going into the development of the game, I knew that if I were to get this right, there would be a lot of artistic implementation that I may not be capable implement because as a developer, I’m more code/design focused in my skillset. That being said, with the use of the generic resources allowed to complement the models I created, everything ended up being within scope and I was able to create what I think to be an aesthetically pleasing environment. The coding was pretty straight forward, I knew what needed to be done and generally had no issues with getting anything I needed to get working. That being said, I did have to learn how to code post-production effects which was an interesting challenge. There was a good balance of both sides of development and I feel I was able to get a good mix of both areas. I think the most fun part of creating this game came from all the nostalgia that came from digging back through all the old photos and writing voice-lines for my post-episode reflections. As for the least fun, it was probably creating the art, but it was definitely a necessary experience to further my skills in these areas. Overall, I think Sunflower ended up being a good test of both my actual game development skills and a test of my creative direction.