The goal for this project was to create a game with the theme of "the last one" with a team in one day (12 hourrs) in person at the Made @The MADE game jam 2025. We had two developers, three artists, and a composer / sound designer and access to the indie dev workstations upstairs at the MADE (Museum of Art & Digital Entertainment) in Oakland, CA. We had the challenge of making a web executable build using 4 directional controls and 2 interactable buttons in order to be able to feature our game on the Winnietron arcade machine at the MADE.
Once we received the theme of "The Last One" , we brainstormed a few ideas and eventually landed on a tamagotchi-inspired Loch Ness Monster game. Only having a day, we knew we wouldn't have much time to prototype or do art, so we decided on a simple 2D game with one main goal (to keep Nessie's health / happiness bar up) with a few main interactions to achieve this (feed Nessie, keep the lake clean, stop photographers from taking pictures of her). We would do some sketches and map out some user flows, but then we would jump straight into assets and dev. We landed pretty quickly on the name "My Bestie Nessie".
We brainstormed some 2D styles to make the game in, landing Tamagotchi & Scribblenauts as the inspiration for the gameplay / art. Not much development research needed to take place as the developers on the team were confident that they could pull off the basic gameplay we came up with in Unity.
I created storyboards for the key screens such as the start screen, credits, gameplay, and win / loss states. We planned on bringing a comedic element to the game to enhance the simple gameplay experience.
I created sketches for the main character and photographer sprites as well as simple walk cycles and state changes. I also created sprite sketches for the trash and fish as well as states showing how much of each are in the boat. I also sketched the illustrations for the win & loss states consistent with Kayatama's Loch Ness Monster design created in SketchBook.
After solidifying the color palette, I created digital versions in Apple Procreate of all the sprite sketches I had made and delivered them to the developers who had been working with placeholder assets up until that point. I collaborated with the game designer to put together digital versions in Adobe Illustrator of the pages I had sketched out. Everything came together and we were able to finish on time, the game can be played for free on itch.io or at the MADE on the Winnietron arcade machine. My Bestie Nessie
