Grand prize winner of the
2022 Anime Expo Chibi Game Jam,
developed by Team Bitrot
Moonbridge Library was developed over the course of a month with David Frankel, Stephen Trinh, and myself. Following the game jam’s theme of “whimsical,” we decided upon a narrative game where the player crafts books to fulfill customers’ orders and advance the story. I was responsible for all the illustrations, UI design, and writing the narrative. UX and game design were collaborative efforts between the three team members.
Start Menu
Options menu where the player can adjust the audio volume, and on which day their game will begin.
The About menu has credits information regarding the game.
Main Menu
The game progresses over several days, with each day broken up into three sections — morning, afternoon, and night. An animation plays whenever time has progressed. This animation was designed and its assets were drawn by me, while David Frankel did the animation in Unity.
Day Progression
Each day begins with a conversation between our protagonist Almira and her faithful companion and assistant Pingo the bookwyrm.
Screenshots of the Main Gameplay
When a customer comes in, they’ll make small talk with Almira, then provide an existing book for the player to transform; this book has predetermined values that the player will then need to modify by adding four different ingredients, each with different values attributed to each.
Once the player has finished selecting all four ingredients, they can click the CRAFT button to begin the minigame portion of the crafting experience.
There are three minigame types, and each ingredient is linked to one type of minigame. These were all designed by David Frankel. Using his initial prefabs in Unity as a basis, I created polished art assets to replace his temp art, then placed and aligned the images in the project.
After the three minigames are finished, the player must draw a seal to complete the binding. The idea was designed by me and implemented by David Frankel. Again, the image assets were also drawn by me.
At the end of crafting, a special animation will play of the crafted book’s completion. The color of each book is randomized, and the center glyph is dependent on the book’s highest genre attribute.
From left to right, the first five were designed by me and the last two (Literary Kid and Longshoreman) were designed by fellow Team Bitrot member David Frankel. I refined his designs to match the style of the other characters I had already drawn. Originally, I wanted to have animal-headed characters, but they contrasted too much with the human-headed characters and I nixed the idea.
Character Design Sheets
After we had decided on a magical book-crafting game, the first task I set out on was the layout. There were many sketches made that were immediately deleted shortly after their conceptions; the above are the ones that survived. The first series of sketches were drawn before we had a focused and clear game design. Proposed Layout 1 is the first concept made after we were all in agreement of our game’s structure and core gameplay. After landing on Proposed Layout 2, I set to work on finalizing the look of the UI which fortunately did not take me much time.
A Figma flow of the game can be found here.
User Interface Conception Process
There are three parts: the book’s body, the outline, and the center glyph. The grayscale book body is colorized at random in Unity to make each result unique. The outline and glyph are always gold in color, and the glyph that appears is dependent on what attribute of the book’s is the highest.
The morning and afternoon scenes share the same background and foreground imagery with the lights turned off, and have the addition of a colored fill light coming in from the ceiling. The image asset itself is a white gradient, but in the image to the left are the two colorized version for each time of day.
The night scene has its own background and foreground images with the lights on without any additional colorized fill light.
Breakdowns of the Scene Assets
Breakdown of the Completed Book Asset
The credits that play at the end of the game. After the logo fades in and out, the credits scroll up, then the “Thank you for playing!” text appears. The additional particle effects were added by David Frankel, and the illustrations and credits animation were done by me.
End Credits
Postmortem Thoughts
The Anime Expo Chibi Game Jam of autumn 2022 is the second game jam I've completed. A year prior, I was fortunate enough to take part in the Ludum Game Jam with a group of six with whom I worked well. We named ourselves Team Bitrot, inspired by that game jam’s theme of “glitch.” This time around, only four of us were available to collaborate together again, David Frankel, Stephen Trinh, Tommy Pedrini, and myself. Using what I learned from that experience, I worked harder on this Anime Expo Chibi Game Jam to make sure I planned out realistic goals within the given time frame, which was a generous 4 weeks. Even still, I worked up until the last hour and spent many sleepless nights draining myself creatively.
David, Stephen, and I collectively led the project and would regularly bring new ideas to the table. After deciding a magical book-crafting game would fit the game jam’s theme of “whimsical,” we debated if the game should be an endless loop with randomized customers and orders or a narrative with set designs. After a bit of deliberation, we decided upon the latter and I offered to write the story and its characters, as I was the strongest proponent of having a narrative. This meant I was now responsible for the UI design, all illustrative art, and the narrative.
My first two weeks of the project were spent designing characters, concepting the main UI, and attempting creative writing. I found myself regularly typing then erasing in what seemed like a fruitless cycle for days. I’ve spent a decent amount of time prior designing characters for my own enjoyment, and found that process to be rather smooth. However, the same cannot be said for creative writing, where my last attempt at such a thing was in freshman year of high school. I spent a week in a seemingly Sisyphean effort of writing and deleting, which in retrospect bore fruit in the form of helping me develop each character’s personality and motives. Discussing the crafting levels’ scope with my group members gave me clarity on how the narrative should be structured and designed. I had initially written a story that was better fit for a one hour or longer experience, but touching base with Stephen brought me back to reality and guided me to write for a 10-15 minute game.
The last two weeks I worked on this project was a blur of late nights spent creating a game flow in Figma, drawing polished character art, background illustrations, art assets for minigames, and writing a fresh narrative from start to finish (which was somehow completed in a matter of two days). At approximately 3am of the due date, nine hours before the deadline, I finished the splash art and sent off everything to my peers to make the final build for submission. This version of the game was missing a few things, namely a proper end credits and a settings menu. Even without these things, we were proud of what we had made in the time we were given.
To my surprise, we won the grand prize. In all honesty, I had forgotten this was even a competitive event. We spent a couple weeks slowly adding a few new features to our game, and resubmitted it to itch.io. I had originally hoped to be able to use this game jam to brush up on Unity, namely animations, building UI, and particle effects, but my attention was more crucially needed on grinding out art and story. I was fortunately able to find a bit of time to spend in Unity, and sincerely look forward to the opportunity to work more in the engine the next time I do another game jam with this fine crew.