GA Spring 2023 – Lemon Forest

The game

Lemon Forest is a 3D game we created for the Spring Semester of Games Academy. This was an original social simulation game concept, referencing other similar games like Animal Crossing by Nintendo and casual, chill mobile games such as Cats & Soup.

The game’s idea is to do quests for your village friends, gain currency to buy items to accomplish other quests and to buy stuff to customize your own character. Some of your village friends might only have secret quests for you during the night! If you’re more of an adventurer, you can also roam around the island and visit the lighthouse.

Our plan was to make a relaxing and a simple game with focus on dialogue, customizing the player character, and upgrading the village with new items. From the very beginning everyone was very interested in this concept, and we came up with all sorts of unique ideas for the main character’s background story and how we wanted the game to look like. In the end we decided to go for a less crazy fantasy magical, to more dreamy, fairytale-like forest. Few copyright free sounds were added, but otherwise everything else was our production.

Below are some concept art of the game:

Design/development process

The artists began by illustrating their ideas. Our plans were quite big so there was a lot to design. We divided the work based on what each of us wanted to learn and focus on during the Spring. Some concentrated more on the environmental aspects and some more on the characters. Midway we divided even more for UI design, animation and storytelling. Regardless, everyone kept up communication and found something they wanted to do and learn.

How well did we accomplish our goals?

Our team agreed that the course work concentrated a lot on more realistic style modeling and since our game was very cartoony, we had to search more answers from the internet instead. Our main issue was lack of coordination due to a lack of leadership, and a very big scope, so we didn’t manage to implement everything we planned.

However, the game turned out cute with fun quests! It’s playable, and that’s what we aimed for. Everyone got the chance to try something new and learn a lot from it, which we think is most important as a student project.

Overall the project was a good opportunity to practise teamwork and especially learning that we don’t need to do everything alone, but instead ask others for help. It was awesome working together and not getting stuck with things alone. The team felt a safe space to learn new things on our own speed and with our own limits. When someone was unavailable, everyone was always forgiving and filled in for the tasks.

Pictures of the final product:

Link to the game: https://aceyyyy.itch.io/lemon-forest-final

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