#sharifs

I had to learn Twine when we first started writing for Unicorn Crossing. After awhile Katie decided against implementing Twine in Unity, and we moved on to Yarn Spinner, which is more complex and easier to implement. However, this past spring I freelanced for a company that did use Twine as their means of handling dialogue branching. That was great for me because Twine is my easy mode. It’s how I learned.

I wanted to move on from this job when it was contract renewal time but also pass the torch to someone new. The problem was that job needed someone who understood mental health, could write for the age group, was a good writer, and had the technical skills in Twine to actually write the dialogue for the game.

The depressed unicorn image was something that I came to by writing a story in response to a classmate’s work. I gave him a critique that his abstract work needed some more to ground it. When aesthetic debate failed, I tried to write a story that mimicked his silliness while still being uniquely mine and more importantly as a proof of concept for my aesthetic theory. That brought me to “Unicorn Hunting” which would be published in Specs: Journal of the Arts. That classmate kind of wrote the story off and gave me condescending encouragement to “keep trying” or something like that. But it set in motion my aesthetic as it really was the first time I broke down what I believed artistically and then attempted to do it. This started my obsession with the sad, suicidal unicorn which ultimately was a stand in for my own mental illness.

It was this work in the realm of unicorns that had my roommate show me the reboot to My Little Pony. Fun fact: Art of Distress is a reference to the My Little Pony song “Art of the Dress” and our original project was a horror game for Chromecast we made for a game jam, not a mental health game.

The game “Unicorn Crossing” came up when Katie, Jeremy, and I were celebrating Jeremy’s birthday. Jeremy and Katie were talking about a game design concept that I think is now lost to time, but it gave me the idea for a depression simulator where you manage your mood, willpower, and social energies. We spent the rest of the day brainstorming on this...Okay, so we also went to Build-A-Bear.

Weeks later Katie, having had read my master’s thesis, kind of saw the unicorn as my depression comics pony. Here was Katie’s placeholder programmer art. (Katie and I have very much the same workflow in that we both like to start on paper and end in the computer.)

She even gave it my OC’s cutie mark and curly hair. There’s something really cute about this look. I was really tempted to ask Katie to just make the art. There’s something like a first love every time you meet your character for the first time. You’re tempted to think that this is the one, and Romeo and Juliet die for your teenage crush. You have to keep designing though. The next iteration was my putting slightly different proportions on Katie’s basic idea. I tried to remove some of the My Little Pony elements. Also the parts that were just my OC.

About a year after the initial idea we did a game jam where I started to work with a redesign. I was a writer trying to write cartoons. As a way of taking charge of my own destiny I started studying drawing and animation to expand my prospects. We scrapped this design when Jeremy said he didn’t like the beady eyes. I put kawaii eyes on and something didn’t work. Somehow Unicorn Crossing was lacking its soul. We were having trouble finding it from the points of view of visual design, gameplay, and story.

For a lot of reasons Unicorn Crossing kind of just went into a box. Seemed like Katie and I both needed to grow professionally, artistically, and mentally before we could guide this game back on track.