This game is a Socially Anxious Conversation Simulator. In it, you must maintain eye contact with and listen to your conversation partner, while also searching for conversation topics you can introduce while they are talking. I chose this project primarily because I envisioned it to be a game centered around UI navigation, which I predicted would be in scope and not too difficult to implement, and because I wanted to connote my experience of being deep within my own mind whenever I’m meeting people or generally nervous in conversations. I wanted the game to have a heavy emphasis on multitasking, hoping to express how exhausting and/or nerve-wracking it can be for me to meet people.

After I implemented all of my game’s functionality (scrolling text, dig button, responding to the NPC, etc.), the game became considerably more enjoyable to make. The earliest stages of development were a multi-hour, brute forced labor of necessity (not love), as I followed tutorials online, then ruined all of that code as I tried tailoring it to my game. Once I was able to focus more on content generation, I found development to be pleasant and almost therapeutic (except when nothing would work properly). I think it was a smart call to give my project such limited scope, as even this (in hindsight) easily implementable project was extremely arduous and time consuming. At around the halfway point, I decided I would just make the process more time-consuming than arduous, and just dumped an embarrassing amount of spaghetti code all over. My project is far from eloquent, but it’s functional, and that’s a damn miracle.