Intro
I approached my group members with a simple idea: A visual novel, perhaps set in Monterey, California, perhaps a mystery—I knew the scope of our project would be small, considering none of us had ever made a game before and we only had roughly a month, but I couldn’t help imagining a complex, sensational story, like Doki Doki Literature Club.
We made a visual novel that was nowhere near that kind of level.
Still, I’m very proud of what we accomplished in such a short amount of time. What’s for Dinner? is a short visual novel that chronicles a small child (named by the player) who is asked by their mother to go get ingredients for dinner. The child has the choice of a meat- or vegetable-based dish, and has to remember their mother’s instructions about what to buy. Depending on the ingredients that the child buys, the dinner at the end of the short game is a) a glorious dish, b) a normal dish, or c) a dish beholden to a miasma of stink and despair.
Team Vizu-L
In alphabetical order:
Maryll Phillips: Project Manager, Storyboarding, Dialogue, and QA
Olivia Plowman: Chief Art Director, Story/Concept, Research
Sook Shin: Storyboarding, Dialogue, Korean Translation & LQA
Hsinwei Tseng: Dialogue, Coding
Hanchun Wang: Audio, Chinese-Simplified Translation & LQA
My Role
The first role I undertook in this project was story and concept. Like I mentioned above, I came up with rather wild ideas for mysteries, but these were scrapped once we realized that yes, making a game is hard, especially one with choices. I had just watched Old Enough!, a Netflix show that depicts young Japanese children going about their first errands, which is a significant milestone in Japanese culture. I took great inspiration from this and I and my teammates shaped it into What’s for Dinner?
My main role in this project was that of the Chief Art Director. I am an amateur artist, but I thought that the story our team decided on would be more charming with hand-drawn backgrounds and character art. The player takes the role of a small child, after all, so I wanted it to be a “cozy” and “adorable” experience. The creation of all the assets took hours upon hours to do, and while I have always appreciated artists, I realized just how hard and time-consuming their work is. It’s incredible!
Included in the video below is a timelapse of the background paintings (unfortunately, I forgot to record drawing the other art pieces!).
Using Confluence and Jira
For this project, we all decided to get our hands dirty with the Atlassian tools Confluence and Jira, which are online collaboration tools for teams. We used these tools to create pages and workspaces to organize our notes, assign people to tasks, and track bugs. These really are great tools, and I feel like we only just scratched the surface with what they have to offer.
