PROJECT OVERVIEW

Questaholic

2021

Team Rookies

For this classic adventure game-inspired journey through learning self care, I had to embrace vulnerability as I used my personal experience to guide its core design from the lead role. Through its mechanics, disguised as nothing more than your normal quest cycle, the player is made to embody the feelings of fatigue and burnout caused by neglecting to listen to their own limitations as they overload on quests and side quests. By creating these unexpected conditions in familliar settings, the player is invited to organically learn to self regulate and rest. The narrative, in turn, solidifies this understanding by putting what the player has just felt into words and encouraging them to seek balance. By its nature, the design of this game is incredibly personal to me and has continued to evolve in my mind long after its completion. My continued hope with it and any future concepts that follow its model is that players may tap into the unique carthasis brought on only by games, to learn through play to look inwards and listen.

Director and Game Designer - Designer of core concept's pitch and themes
Producer and Project Manager - Organized team and managed core documentation
Lead Artist - Lead art direction to guide visual feel; Created art and animation for enemy characters and UI sprite design
Level Designer - Designed the world and mechanics layout for Questaholic's demo map
Additional Programmer

This project was created for the Making Meaningful Games course at American University.

GAME SUMMARY

Tech Stack

Dev Platform: Unity 2020.3
Code Editor: Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Version Control: GitHub
Artistic Software: Adobe Photoshop
Planning Workspace: Microsoft Office - Word and Trello

Development Time Frame - 2 weeks

Team Size - 4

"Life's an adventure. No need to live at all once."

Workaholism, Completionism, Perfectionism:

the triad of -isms that seemingly seeks to control our lives, searching for each remaining drop of effort at the expense of everything else. The more they consume us, the more our work becomes our worth and whatever our best efforts may be may never seem good enough. The world feels narrower as our vision focuses in on the next task that must be done... and the next one... and the next, until work becomes all we can see.

Questaholic gives the player a lens to experience this flawed perception while narratively positing its solution – balance. By placing the player into a classic adventure game, the player is implicitly told they should take on as many quests as they can. The mechanics however tell a different story, slowing the player down as they take on too much at once, blurring the world around them and pushing in on an increasingly drastic tunnel vision. In turn, the narrative pushes the player to respect their own limits, to let some things go when needed, and to live and work at one’s own pace.

This project was created for the Making Meaningful Games course at American University.