Here is a series of assets that were made for the game.
All of the audio and non-UI art assets were made by Hope.
​
On this page, there will also be some behind-the-scenes explanations of the process, from the point of view of Hope.
​
Off to the left here are the two main tracks you hear in the game.
​
FUN FACT: Did you know you can pet the cat in the game? His little meow is made from a cat named Sammy!
When designing the creatures, we knew already what kind of animals we wanted (Cat, Crustacean, Fungus, Spider, and a Bird/Lizard Hybrid) but the main question was "What do they look like?" How can we make them look alien but not lose that cute factor we all wanted? I ended up using the MidJourney AI for this project to speculate because I wanted to also experiment with the bot in general, and it ended up giving us a very good starting point! I ran with "cute green cat" and ended up making more lore for her as we kept going. Like how her "horns" are actually retractable claw-like material.
Jun was easier to nail down. We knew we wanted an assistant that would aid the player - it was just a matter of if they were a man or a woman. We fell in love with the image to the direct left of this text box (It's our discord icon for this project!) and thus the basis for Jun was born.
Jun ended up going through a LOT of changes in her design, unlike the creatures, and a lot of her fashion are call backs to various other media (Her hair buns are a reference to GLaDOS from the Portal series, her badge is a reference to Star Trek, and so on and so forth)
For the Lab itself, we wanted a clear Imperial Chinese influence, so we again returned to MidJourney to get some jumping-off points. We loved the giant window in the renders, so when I went to go make the image I had to include it. I do not have the most technical painting skills so I ended up making a base for the background in The Sims 4 and roughly tracing the image in PaintToolSAI. I added some flare and some plants and such. If you look closely, you can see two of the creatures that unfortunately did not make it into the game but their assets were finished. Crusty is in the aquarium and Fungi is in the tree!
​
Audio
For the sound design of the game, I went with a more instrumental design rather than a futuristic design because although the game takes place in space, there is still something so human about wanting to learn about the world around you - thus traditional style instruments.
I mainly used the pipa, the guzheng, and the dizi for the buttons. All instruments were made using the software GarageBand and ProTools Ultimate.
I went through a lot of passes for the music and eventually drew inspiration from two of my previous projects, R@tZ and Telemancer, to emulate a calming yet interesting theme that hopefully would not get annoying over time.
For the Sound Test, I really wanted to make a genuine high and low frequency, but both being melodic versus just a sound. The high frequency can be heard with regular speakers but in order to hear the low frequency, you must wear headphones or pay attention to the creature's reaction!
The Microscope Test is the main reason why the cat creature, Felijadia, is a female! The only good reference images I could find of cells from a domestic cat were ovarian cells. The green cellular image is taken from a plant sample.
Other easter eggs
FUN FACT: Did you know if you type "doitforher" in the credit scene, you get this image?