Adulting | Senior Thesis Introduction
My idea for senior thesis is to create a simple, story-oriented 2D rpg game themed around the idea of adulting. In the game, players will play as John, a high school graduate that didn’t exactly graduate on the best terms due to the anxiety that built up from the idea of growing up and the irresponsible decisions that resulted because of that. Hoping it’d help him get his head together, his parents send him off that Summer to his grandparents’ home in the countryside. The game will focus on these 3–4 months of his life, the people he meets, the new experiences he’s given, and the slow changing of his perspective on adulthood. To serve as breaks between the chunks of dialogue and story, the game will there will be small minigames here and there that simulate farm life and give players a better sense of the quiet, mundane but relaxing atmosphere of the town. For example, this could be feeding barnyard animals, milking a cow, or running errands to the one general store the town has.
Becoming an adult isn’t you hitting an age milestone and magically waking up one day suddenly all ready to pay the bills, being perfectly organized, anxiety “be gone”-ed, and all that jazz. Nor does adulting only look one way or have one definition. People grow at different rates and there is no such thing as someone perfectly adulting no matter how perfect they seem to be doing from your perspective. I hope that through playing this game and both relating to and seeing John’s own slow maturation and change in perspective that they’d come to realize this.
As for how I’m creating this game, it’ll be coded up and put together in Unity with the help of Yarn. As for all of the art assets, I will be drawing them digitally in the program Clip Studio Paint and doing any needed edits or adjustments through Photoshop. Animation-wise, I will be drawing the character sprites in a way that I’d be able to use Unity’s puppet animation system to rig and animate instead of drawing frame-to-frame animation in order to save time.
