GRoMANCER - in Production
Automation-Farming Dating-Sim
Co-Producer/UX Designer
About the project and team
Team Size: 19
Engine: Unreal 5.4
Project Duration: 30 Weeks
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.
The team is made up of 19 people, 8 Artists, 6 Programmers, 4 Designers, and 1 Music and Sound designer. The project is in it’s second semester of production, and will release later in 2026.
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.
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.
Retrospective
This project is still on going, but so far I am happy with both my work as Co-Producer, managing a team of 19 people, as well as the UX designer.