Illustration by Michael DeForge
Vanitas
Austin Burkett, Christine Mi, Haoyang Li, Nico Carlson, Yin Hong
Austin Burkett, Christine Mi, Haoyang Li, Nico Carlson, Yin Hong
Vanitas - Trailer
+In one or two sentences, describe the main themes present in your game.
Vanitas is a jazzy mystery game where you play a constantly evolving dice game with a strange woman on a train to nowhere.
+What was the inspiration of the game?
What made your team decide to make this game specifically?
We drew heavy inspiration from games like Inscryption, If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers, and folk dice games like Prudencia and Liar's Dice. We decided to make this game because of our love of crunchy narrative games that use engaging systems to enhance an enthralling story.
+Were there difficult moments when developing the game? What led to those difficult moments? What did you learn from it?
We suffered most from our own ambition. We had lofty goals of a large exploratory area, layered puzzles, and a slowly unravelling mystery. When we realized this was out of scope, we had to make strategic cuts to try to preserve our vision while also ending the semester with a finished vertical slice. So, we settled on pouring our time into developing the foundation of the game with the hopes that we would be able to build outwards after the semester is concluded.
+Were there features you ha to remove, and if so, what were they and why were they removed?
Less so features and more so content. We essentially fully created the bones of the game we had envisioned, but severely cut back on the amount of content available to the player like a demo or vertical slice. While this content is written out, it has yet to be implemented into the game (but hopefully will be in the future)!
+Talk about your teammates! What was everyone's role?
We all participated in the design of the game but following is a breakdown of our more specific roles.
Austin: Audio Lead
Christine: Narrative Lead and Supporting UI and Art
Haoyang: Production Lead and Supporting UI, Art, and Engineering
Nico: Engineering Lead and Supporting Narrative
Yin: Art Lead
play this game on itch.io