Kristina Gu

free him

Concept art for free him
free him was developed over the course of a semester for CS 3152: Introduction to Computer Game Architecture. It's a turn-based strategy game inspired by a retro synthwave aesthetic, where you play as a mercenary hacker hired to ruin the lives of employees of the shady company that wronged your client. Hack and blackmail your way through the shadowy ranks of the mysterious Torchlight Corporation to complete each hitlist before the deadline, but be careful not to make your targets too suspicious, or you'll be the one whose life is ruined instead.

Screenshot of free him's level editor
As Project Lead, I led and managed a team of six throughout development of the game. I also worked as a programmer, implementing primarily backend and some frontend elements, but my main contribution was our level editor, which I developed largely on my own. free him was coded in Java using LibGDX, as was the level editor.

design

Title screen for free him
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. I wanted these more grounded elements to also be visually present in a limited yet jarring way, to create tension when reality intrudes on the fantasy.

Concept art for in-game popup revealing a target's dark secret
More of our design elements can be seen in the game manual I created for free him as part of the class.

Game manual for free him, created for the accompanying class ENGRC 3152: Communication in Game Development

looking back

Before working on this project, I actually had 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 changes and do a lot 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 slowly learned about how to make things look less ugly, starting from the admittedly very ugly initial attempt, and ending with the final concept art that we used and that I'm actually quite proud of, considering what I started with.