I was also the primary designer of our game's mechanics, UI, and overall look. I'm a huge fan of synthwave music and the 80's retro-futurist aesthetic in general, and part of what I love about it is the juxtaposition between its idealized vision of the past and the less-than-glorious reality. I wanted to play with that juxtaposition with free him by giving it the look of the 80's glorified vision of hacking and cyberspace, but having mechanics and a narrative that were more modern, centering around using hacking to uncover secrets for blackmail fuel by digging into targets' digital presences. The goal was for these more grounded elements to also be visually present in a limited yet jarring way, like with our text pop-ups, thereby creating tension when reality intrudes on the fantasy.

More of our design elements can be seen in the game manual I created for free him as part of the class.

I was also responsible for most of the visual design and created all our assets except for our “skill” thumbnails. Due to some unfortunate logistical issues, there were no dedicated artists available to be on our team, and as a result I ended up stepping up to try and compensate. However, before working on this project, I had effectively no experience at all with visual art, and needed to learn Adobe Illustrator from scratch for the sake of the project. Although I did use Creative Commons assets to ease some of the burden, I did still have to make a lot of modifications and create some assets from scratch, which meant that there was a bit of a learning curve. The slideshow below shows how the look of our game evolved over time as I grew less clumsy with Adobe Illustrator and more confident in executing on the intended vision.