Psychological Manipulation Simulator
The Team
- James Keller (Designer / Programmer)
- Johen Lu (Environment Artist)
- Joshua Paton (Programmer / Playtest Coordinator)
- Lap Herng Wong (Designer)
- Charlie Bui (Designer)
- Yusei Nakajima (Designer)
- Kain Tazumi (Designer)
- Christopher St George (3D Artist / Designer)
Overview
Psychological Manipulation Simulator is an incremental game about winning tickets, and multiplying those winnings, all with the aim of filling out a massive 250 card collection. Me and a team of 7 other students got the opportunity to develop this game from the ground up in Unity across two semesters.
What I did
Throughout the project, I worked across a few different roles. I started as our team's Producer, but with 52 pieces of unique artwork to complete and a chronic lack of artists, I switched roles at the end of the first semester and took on the task of creating the collectible cards.
In addition to 52 artworks, each card also had 5 rarities, so I got to design the frames for each rarity as well. Despite being a lot of work, creating these assets was incredibly fun. We only had placeholder designs for the cards, so I had total freedom to create them from the ground up, which was both challenging and fun. Getting to write the story behind each card was really cool because I got to tie two cards together and build my own 'extended universe' with crossovers between cards and characters. On the skills side of things, since many of the cards featured similar characters or props, I got very good at designing assets that could be reused across scenes.
The technical process for making each card was relatively simple. I would model out the card artwork in Blender, export it to Substance Painter for texturing, and then import it back to Blender for rendering. From there, I would composite the artwork render with the card frame and any accompanying text in Photoshop. Ultimately the end products were 2D, but they were designed in a way that it would have been possible to implement them in 3D (for things like parallax effects etc.), however we did not end up doing this due to time and scoping constraints.