SELFIE

ROLE: Producer, Designer

TEAM: Solo + Creative Partners

PLATFORM: Unity

Selfie was designed from its origins to be a short, ironic jab at our own self absorption. With more emphasis on visual consistency and concept coherence, the gameplay was kept simple, but driven. Lighthearted with a grim twist, Selfie was always meant to draw smirk and a tiny stab of personal reflection.

TARGET

Using the concept art and vision of a company based out of Seattle, build a short-form, HTML-ready game that delivered an obvious jibe with gameplay simple enough to reach a wide target audience.

SCHEDULE

The original schedule of this project was around two months. This was to be the core period of development. Another month or so of buffer room was left for testing, debugging, and refactoring. This turned out to be a challenging schedule due to outside limitations for both involved parties. Life threatening sickness, long distance relocations, and other challenges interrupted development and took precedence. In order to navigate these challenges, I doubled down on working when opportunities arose, leading to some very late nights. However, my partners were also delayed considerably in their anticipated launch efforts. Ultimately, I completed the project within the adjusted timeline, but not without significant stress.

CONSIDERATIONS

Selfie was always meant to be delivered as part of a multimedia package. As such, the most important goal was to match preexisting tonality. Art, controls, scope, and more fundamental choices were driven by the intended use case of this game. More specifically, it was merely meant to take no more than a couple minutes of an interested player's time. Make a point, get a smile, and that was all. With this in mind, I decided a simple sidescroller would be familiar to a wide audience. I went for a 2.5D effect, since I was already familiar with Unity's 3D features, intending to use materials to get the right look and save the time of learning new 2D features.

GAMEPLAY

When brainstorming game concepts that could fit in a HTML format and have a sardonic twist, I came up with the idea of Selfie. Originally, I had intended for the game to have two sides. The player would play as the foolish photographer dodging through traffic, risking life and limb to get popular. The second half was meant to be a set of security cameras watching all the streets and intersections of that same city block, take screenshots of hapless citizens taking selfies in crosswalks. These gameplay elements would double down on the sociopolitical statement, but it was ultimately judged to be too ambitious for the short timeline, and the first portion was retained to form Selfie.

I wanted the gameplay to have a unique element, and I thought about the idea of turning around to take selfies. Realizing this would lead to some confusing movement for player controllers, I decided this was just the fraction of chaos I needed to create tension while crossing busy streets. By limiting players to a binary perspective choice, front or back, immediately risk is introduced to players. However, risk isn't enough. There needed to be reward. Players were trying to get picture with valuable targets. I decided to increase the frantic pace of players crossing streets by scaling the speed of targets by their point value. Additionally, I introduced a scarcity system for spawning valuable targets. Combined with a time limit indicated by strong visual cues, players are compelled to choose between dangerously chasing high value targets or safely pursing slow but ultimately unimportant distractions.

CHALLENGES

One major challenge of this project was matching the art style to preexisting professional art introduced by my partner on this project. I was generally unfamiliar with any kind of advanced material design in Unity beforehand, and in order to match the design, I had to spend an inordinate amount of time learning and tinkering to get a matching feel. Although this delayed design of other features, it was a high priority for my partners that their release package feel coherent. However, this bleeds into the second major challenge: communication. In order to sync ideas and refine development before anything became too much of commitment, this project required significant back and forth. Unfortunately, this became difficult as my partners became committed to other projects and responsibilities, and my personal life underwent many speed bumps. Communication was important so that neither party had unrealistic expectations, and the best game possible could be made and delivered on time.

FINAL RESULTS

Although I did end up releasing Selfie as a solo production with appropriate credits, I believe my experience working with partners was very valuable. It was good practice exploring ideas and brainstorming with team members. It also motivated me to push my knowledge of Unity further than ever before. The game is fun and looks great, and I can truly say that I am proud of my work.

To try SELFIE yourself, click here!