Over a year ago, I designed and illustrated a cozy mobile game called Sandwich Swipe. The game made its way to the App Store’s Best New Games list in several countries and has been downloaded by over 20,000 users.
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Since then I’ve moved cities, tried out a mix of artistic hobbies, and felt mildly aimless. Now I’m ready to throw myself back into the world of game development.
Sandwich Swipe was the last thing I made that I was deeply proud of. Nothing brings more of a smile to my face than people telling me they enjoyed the game. What started with an unpolished pitch and pen-and-paper sketch is now an actual app. Isn’t that crazy? I even downloaded it on my new phone the other day and I’m slowly making my way through the levels again. I unashamedly find it fun to play.
Chasing the high of Sandwich Swipe, I’ve decided to make another game. The tentative game name is Melted and it’s a story-driven exploration and rogue-lite game. I’ve been sketching ideas for a while now and have finally reached the stage where I have enough clarity to start. I’m feeling naively ambitious, so this time, we’re doing it on hard-mode.
Here is a summary of my game idea and some concept sketches to go along with it.
Melted
Play as a cat who works at a post office for spirits, delivering letters across the ruins of a forgotten town.
The post office manager has suddenly disappeared, leaving you to take over their job. Spirits are waiting for their letters to be delivered, but the mailboxes are scattered across dangerous parts of the map filled with obstacles, puzzles, and enemies.
Each run, the player chooses a letter and attempts to reach the delivery location before their health runs out. The world is a fixed map that players gradually learn through repeated runs, discovering shortcuts and annotating routes on their mini-map as they master increasingly difficult areas.
Every successful delivery reveals part of a spirit’s story, and slowly you will unravel the mystery of the manager’s disappearance.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Press enter or click to view image in full size
This new game has nearly everything we explicitly decided not to do in Sandwich Swipe. The scope is bigger. There will be real characters and complex storylines. It’ll be cross-platform, targeting desktop and console, and I want the animations to be illustrated.
I’m going to be the sole illustrator, animator, programmer, script writer and marketer. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t overwhelmed. In one sense, starting this blog is a form of procrastination, but in another, it’s taking the first necessary step in a very long but exciting journey.
Despite my job as a software engineer and having taken some game development courses in university, I’m particularly nervous to learn Unity and dive into the world of event listeners, shaders, and physics engines. The last time I created a game by myself in Unity was when I followed a roll-a-ball tutorial in 2019–and then decided to make it chicken-themed for a laugh.
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Illustration has always come a lot more naturally for me than programming, so I clung to it during Sandwich Swipe instead of overcoming my fears and touching some of the code. As a result, I have no idea how to approach game architecture.
This time though I want it to be different. I want to make a game to touch people’s hearts while simultaneously teaching myself that you can just do things. I’m also excited to put all the lessons I learned from Sandwich Swipe into practice.
Subscribe, and follow along with my journey as I make this new game!
I’ll be sharing blog posts with behind-the-scenes art, progress updates, and reflections. If you have any learning resources, ideas or game feedback to share, let me know, I’d love to hear from you.