GRoMANCER

Automation-Farming Dating-Sim

Designer/Co-Producer
(UX/UI and Systems Design)

About the project and team

Genre: 3-D Automation Dating-Sim
Team: 4 Designers, 7 Programmers, 7 Artist, 1 Audio
Duration: 30 Weeks
Engine: Unreal 5.4

GRoMANCER is an Automation-Farming Dating-Sim, where the player takes on the role of a magical farmer, and creates a farm that automatically produced products that can be given to NPCs to progress in a romantic relationship. It was made in Unreal Engine 5.

My Contribution

  • Facilitated cross discipline communication.

  • Communicated with instructors on specific requirements pertaining to this project.

  • Worked with instructors to receive feedback and make sure that it was used in any additional work done.

  • Designed and implemented the UI in world space tied to animations, working with the UI artist and our Animator.

Design Philosophy

The design focus of this project is to create a simple enough automation game that the dating sim players will not be scared off from play, while still having enough depth that fans of automation games can create hyper efficient farms.

Design Process

At the start of the project I had not yet take on the role of Co-Producer, so was entirely focused on UX, with working on the UI for the project. The first thing that I did was to do a quick sketch of the UI for our UI artist to do a first pass on.

When forming this team, there was already a strong sense of what we wanted the game to be, as such our first step was putting down our pillars into writing to base our designs off of.

There were two things that were my core focuses while designing the UI for this game. First was that the team wanted as little non-diegetic UI elements as possible. Second was that the team loved the idea of having most of the player interactions done through a magical book.

In the second semester of the project some members of the team expressed that they did not like the original design for the inventory screen, so I worked with one of the design instructors to quickly iterate on the new direction the team expressed interest in going.

At this point in production most of the UI elements have not been implemented in the game engine as we are quickly working on getting all the structures in place to support the designs.

Retrospective

This project ended up running into some technical issues that caused us to have to remove automation from the final class build, and as such the team ended up deciding to not continue development past the 30 weeks.