Simply Complicated

Let me tell you about the one where we developed a video-game about a huge design mistake

COLLABORATION with Bristy Azmi, game development help from Jude White, music by Ben Ibbotson
Role: Branding, video-game design and development, 2D animation, electrical engineering, physical computing, 3D design
Softwares: Unity, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Arduino
Exhibited at Somerset House, London (Digital Edge 2019)

Stepping out of comfort zone: 🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶 (never again)

Photography by Thomas Adank

Simply Complicated is a video game where the play follows Bristy and I in a quest to build a 3D printer to print a key in 48 hours before the player’s pet "Peeve" dies of starvation, stuck inside of a school locker. The game is actually a documentation to our process of building the MEGA RAMPS, a 3D printer we built from scratch at University.

In October 2018, Bristy and I caused our lives a lot of stress by diving head first into building a 3D printer from scratch for three months, with absolutely 0 prior knowledge or experience in engineering.

After over 40+ mistakes and errors which delayed the making for weeks, our expectations for success decreased dramatically. Despite the errors, Bristy and I refused to stop working on that printer because we had already invested too much time and money into building it. This last mistake made us rush into finishing it and made things far more complicated than they had to be. The project was no longer about the printer itself but about the experience of two students whose stubbornness fueled both their work and mistakes. The errors defined our project and, to remain in the spirit of our practice, we decided to record our horrible process into an interactive video-game, immersing the player into our stubborn mindsets and series of stupid, avoidable mistakes.

Because in the end, why make it simple when you can make it complicated?

To win the game, you must go through all the tasks without your time and money running out. Be careful of your stress levels! If they are too high, you will be forced to take a nap and lose time. If your money runs out, no worries, you can do some design work (play pictionary) to gain money. If your time runs out, Peeve dies and you lose the whole game. Your friends and tutors are here to provide advice, tips and help, and each time they speak, your stress level decreases thanks to their help. Except for Kelvin’s. No offence, love you.

I designed all the assets in Illustrator using my own designs. For character design, I used existing Flat Icon characters and edited them to resemble our friends. This was my first time using Unity 2D for video games and building a 3D printer from scratch. We took coding classes with Jude White every Saturday for three months. I am not as proficient anymore but I use Unity once in a while and can pick it up if trained formally. To know about the arcade-building process, please refer to Check-Out!

Original 8bit music by Ozzed, remixed by Ben Ibbotson. The original 8bit is used for jarring purposes in mini-games, to creating an effect of stress and induce headaches. Ben Ibbotson’s remixes are lo-fi and are used in certain game scene animations to create a feeling of chill.

Final teaser for the game ︎︎︎

Final gameplay recording ︎︎︎