First Person Sweetheart
First Person Sweetheart is a digital visual novel I developed as part of a team of four within 72 hours for the UGD x Careers Winter Game Jam 2024, which also won second place in the game jam as a whole! In First Person Sweetheart, you play as a gamer in a long-distance relationship navigating conversations with your partner in between spending your day playing various games. The theme of the game jam was “X within an X” and for this theme, we settled on the idea of a “game within a game” as well as “computer within a computer.” The game setting simulates a computer desktop with the player opening various apps as they go through the story. Additionally, the game features various mini-games to simulate playing games encompassing the idea of being a game within a game. Overall, First Person Sweetheart was a project focused on paying homage to various aspects of gamer culture and serving as a story relatable to anybody in a long-distance relationship.
My Contributions
For this project, I found myself wearing many hats throughout the process, considering this was a game jam entry it was crucial for us to make the most of our time and this resulted in me assisting with many areas of the game throughout the 72 hours. Throughout the game jam, I assisted with game design, script writing, programming, and art production. With game design, I pushed for us to do this concept of a game about gamers and helped with designing the concepts for the many parodies within our game as well as the overall structure of the game. I also played a major role in helping write the script, using my knowledge of typical gamer vernacular to produce a script that felt both believable and natural. I produced graphics for our Boulder’s Gate IV scene, the main desktop hub, and the ending images. With programming, I was responsible for programming a couple of the scenes, researching the engine we used for our rhythm game, and implementing background music into our game.
Desktop hub for our game
Process
Boulder’s Gate IV graphic designed by me
In our initial brainstorm of the game, we bounced through many ideas on how to fit the theme. For the idea that led to First Person Sweetheart, we drew inspiration from Emily is Away with its use of a computer UI and chat messages being the main way the story is conveyed, as well as Florence, with its focus on daily life and mini-games within a game.
Following our brainstorming we began producing the graphics needed for our visual novel, I contributed through creating our desktop background, numerous icons for our game parodies, and our ending images. We decided on a visual language of purple to represent the player and yellow to represent the long-distance partner, this color theme reoccurs throughout our game.
Throughout our game, we incorporated numerous video game parodies as well as a full cutscene trailer for one of our parody games. This lends to the overall theme of our game as a game about gamers and as well as adds to the overall humor of our game.
We ironed out the exact dialogue for our whole story after producing the images. After touching base on the needs of our principal programmer, another member and I learned the Ren’py engine so we could program out some of the conversation scenes to allow our programmer to focus on implementing the features that would require more programming expertise.
The team kept organized through the use of Google Drive to organize our assets and active communication through a discord server.