Illustration by Michael DeForge
Uncommon AppJiahao Guo, Zoidberg Zeng, Yuxuan Wang, Bowen Jiang, Lan Hu, Huihan Hu
Uncommon App - Trailer
+In one or two sentences, describe the main themes present in your game.
In a world full of magic, you are the admissions officer of Uncommon University. The fate of our school is in your hands.
+What was the inspiration of the game?
What made your team decide to make this game specifically?
In the early versions, we kept trying to make the gameplay of admissions interesting, but as we did it more and more, we realized that the game was becoming a bit like Papers, Please (but we weren't actually referencing the game), and at this stage I think we were designing our game base on our imaginations of what we wanted to do with the game and our understanding of what the job of an admissions officer was like.
+Were there difficult moments when developing the game? What led to those difficult moments? What did you learn from it?
We've had some stages in the development process that were hard to overcome such as not knowing the order in which a feature should be developed or not knowing how to make a change. These are common problems in game development and learning how to overcome them is what we've been doing this semester. For example, when it was clear that the current gameplay design was not working, we often got together and expressed our opinions and ideas. This brainstorming process helped us find new breakthroughs. We've found that it's actually faster to get people working together to help develop than to give a job to a fixed person.
+Were there features you had to remove, and if so, what were they and why were they removed?
We actually deleted quite a few UI assets and sometimes even had to completely redraw them, especially in the early stages because we didn't have a clear gameplay and also because the game is a UI game, so this often led to the changing of UI when a gameplay wasn't fun, which is a common problem until now.
+Talk about your teammates! What was everyone's role?
Jiahao - Project Manager, Programmer
Zoidberg - Programmer, Artist
Tommy - Programmer, Designer
Yuxuan - Programmer, Artist
Huihan - Artist
Bowen - Designer
Yeung - Sound Designer
Joseph - Sound Designer
play this game on itch.io
Bluesky - @uncommon-app.bsky.social Instagram - @the_uncommon_app