Featured Project: Through the Quiet Lens
Through the Quiet Lens is a web-based visual novel game that explores a theme of mental health with respect to college student stress and anxiety. The storyline narrative allows the player to choose-their-own-adventure by selecting choices to the story's scenarios. Designed with all original art and an easy and intuitive user experience, the gameplay is easy and balances storytelling and visual aesthetics. Featuring a data-driven and extensible narrative engine, the concept can be reused for new storylines catering to a large range of demographics. The richly emotional and introspective journey is grounded in relatable experiences and offers practical and insightful outcomes.
If you're interested in seeing the process behind this project, please checkout my progress blog. To see the entire story script, checkout this Google Doc. To see the mockups and design-workings, checkout my Figma file. To see my code, checkout my GitHub repository.
In-Game Screenshots:
The process of writing the story:
The story writing was really the "main" part of this project, going through multiple iterations, edits, changes, etc. Many parts of the story were written, re-written, changed, as I got a feel of how the narrative should go and how I wanted Sage's story to conclude. Writing out different choices, different paths, different coping strategies- so much time and research went into the narrative to make it feel truly relatable, but also truly real. If you're interested in seeing the entire script, please see my living script Google Doc.
The process of drawing Sage:
All my drawings were done in my iPad using the software MediBang. Below is the drawing process for Variant 1 (Main) of Sage, from line-art to completion.
Artwork Gallery:
All artwork by me, Evelyn Upchurch. All rights reserved.