Quick context - Nicole and I met up at a Women in Games meetup at Dumbo and mentioned making a game sometime... which is what happened about a week later when I began envisioning a decorating game with life simulation aspects inspired by Unpacking and Animal Crossing. So I hit up Nicole, she up hit Vincent and then he hit up Dylan and now suddenly we had a team of four! Our goal was to finish an MVP in three weeks for WAFFLE 6.0 and I had a lot of ambitious ideas that had to be cut down - so we first started small.

Inspo

Premise 

The story is based around the anxiety of moving into a new apartment and meeting new neighbors (and possibly befriending them?!). And also the story of an unlikely character housing a pet (even though it wasn't allowed!!)

Core Mechanics

In the beginning, I thought of mini-tasks utilizing the decorating mechanic to perform actions of maybe finding a certain object under a sock. I also thought of including many many NPCs - each with distinct personalities and a scale of, an anxiety/health bar to force players to interact with their neighbors and take care of themselves, a stamina/energy bar to calculate player actions in a day, and movement in a 3D space,  but you can see how all of that changes later on. We decided to focus on two things for now, the decorating mechanic and the conversation/dialogue system, for which we decided to use a Unity asset called Fungus.

Example Gameplay Loop

Aesthetics 

This was really easy to decide on since, from the start, I wanted to hone in on Nicole's 3D style of art!

Genre and Audience