The grim humor and desperate vitality of Bask in Me

All images courtesy of Hexecutable

The IGF (Independent Games Festival) aims to foster creativity in game development and to recognize independent game creators enhancing the medium. This year, Game Developer connected with the finalists for the IGF’s Nuovo and Grand Prize nominees ahead of GDC to discuss their challenges, design choices, and tools utilized for each entry. Game Developer and GDC are sister organizations under Informa.

Bask in Me is a darkly humorous look at dieting and food, examining a teenager’s life and how every aspect is influenced by the peculiar, sometimes unsettling ways that dieting shapes our perceptions of food.

Game Developer caught up with Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson, co-directors of the multiple-IGF Award nominated title, to discuss the design choices that went into creating food-based minigames that explore the struggles and impacts of dieting, why they opted to approach this theme with humor, and the measures they took to ensure their game would not provoke those with sensitive reactions to dieting and disordered eating.

Who are you, and what was your involvement in creating Bask in Me?

Jenny Jiao Hsia, co-director: Hello, I’m Jenny Jiao Hsia, co-director of Bask in Me; I started developing Bask in Me as my capstone project throughout my undergraduate studies. Years later, I finally managed to persuade a group of various talented individuals to help bring this online game to life with me. I handle everything from prototyping the mini-games, storyboarding the narrative, defining the visual style, drawing most of the characters in the game, adjusting the UI, and assembling many of the non-interactive sequences within the Unity inspector using customized tools built by AP (Thomson). I suppose I also personally experienced what the game and its story are based on… does that count?

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AP Thomson, co-director: Hi, I’m AP Thomson, and I’m one of the co-directors of Bask in Me alongside Jenny. In terms of roles, I handled the majority of the programming, a significant portion of the design work (especially the systems design), a substantial amount of the writing, and I am also the person singing and playing the guitar in the (spoiler) one musical moment in the game[[laughs].

While these two aren’t answering the interview queries, let’s get their names out there:

Jie En Lee (aka Kelly) created a lot of the artwork for the game, particularly almost all of the backgrounds!

Violet W-P handled the sound design!

Ken “coda” Snyder composed the music!

What is your background in video game development?

Hsia: Growing up, I frequently loved to draw but I also disliked video games. When it became clear that I wasn’t suited to be a Doctor, video games somehow transformed into my backup plan. What I mean by that is: during my second year of undergrad, I encountered Games 101 (an art history course but for video games at NYU), met AP, began participating in projects, switched my major to Game Design, and the rest is pretty much history.

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Thomson: I have been creating video games independently for quite some time since I was in high school. Throughout my undergraduate years, I worked at the MIT Gamelab (formerly known as the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab). After that, I went on to obtain an MFA from the NYU Game Center. That’s where I met Jenny. Together, we created and released Stellar Smooch (nominated for Student IGF in 2015) and Beglitched (which won the Student IGF in 2016), along with several other smaller projects over the years. I’ve also launched some other games including Swap Sword (with Diego Garcia), Multibowl (with Bennett Foddy), and Fortune-499 (which was primarily a solo project, with Jenny contributing some of the artwork).

How did you come up with the concept for Bask in Me?

Hsia: I went through quite a bit of disordered eating and dieting as a teenager, and YEARS LATER, after playing Papers Please, I thought it would be interesting to create

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Thomson: I didn’t. Keep asking, Jenny[[laughs].

What kind of tools were utilized to create your game?

Thomson: Essentially, we utilized Unity as our primary game engine, Photoshop and Procreate for crafting 2D assets, Blender for developing 3D assets, Ableton for sound effects, and Google Sheets for our spreadsheets, among other resources. While we’re discussing this, I’d also like to highlight some specific plugins we heavily relied on: Clear Text Mesh is how we achieved all the bouncy, interactive text, Rewired was an indispensable tool for setting up gamepad controls, and (this one is a bit obscure) “Advanced Event” by ByteSheep Digital was a crucial component for creating various editor tools we used throughout development.

Bask in Me transforms food and calorie tracking into a series of minigames designed to mimic the struggles surrounding weight-loss concepts and how they can reshape your understanding of food. Can you share your process in taking these ideas about weight-loss and food and translating them into a minigame? Could you walk us through the creation of one of those minigames?

Thomson: Jenny’s weight-loss journey is a source of stress in her life in numerous ways, and we wanted that to be authentically represented in the game. A key aspect is that there’s more than one way to “fail” in weight-loss: you can eat too much, exceeding your calorie limit, or you can eat too little (or in a manner that’s “unsatisfying”) and end up feeling hungry, OR you might oddly do BOTH simultaneously. Additionally, eating is something you generally do daily, so we aimed to create a minigame that didn’t become stale too quickly. The resulting “food Tetris” minigame arose from attempting to resolve all these limitations. Each food puzzle piece carries a fictional calorie label, but it doesn’t relate to how it affects hunger and cravings (which is ultimately determined by the nature of the food), allowing for the previously mentioned array of outcomes. In any event, we had to revise it extensively before we arrived at the current version[[laughs].

Bask in Me delves into how weight-loss attempts aim to turn food into a mechanical, quantifiable task despite the many complex appetites and emotions experienced within the human body. What considerations went into capturing this struggle with the self during gameplay and how the player’s limited controls affect the minigames?

Thomson: There’s certainly a balance between what the player can control versus what is outside their control, but more significantly, there’s a clear distinction between factors the player is aware of (like the fake calorie counting system, how hungry Jenny is) and factors that remain hidden from them. Ultimately, we wanted to simulate Jenny’s teenage behavior by restricting information in this system. Many of the concealed aspects revolve around the “random encounters.” Essentially, these function through a large deck of event cards, and when the player pulls an event, it randomly selects a card from this deck. However, the player’s choices can secretly add or remove cards from this deck. For example, if Jenny goes to bed feeling hungry (with her hunger meter below 50%), it will introduce a “snack attack” event to the deck, whereby if it gets drawn, Jenny succumbs to her craving and indulges in a large snack.

Food-focused games cannot encapsulate the entire experience as players must also consider the protagonist’s life and responsibilities. What thought process shaped the narrative and how did you turn the main character’s various activities into diverse minigames?

Thomson: Weight-loss doesn’t conclude once you finish lunch. We sought to examine how weight-loss intersects with other aspects of Jenny’s life (how she balances it with schoolwork, social obligations, keeping her mother at bay, and so on). To achieve this, we often had to simulate the rest of Jenny’s life[[laughs]. Furthermore, Bask in Me isn’t solely about the ways in which weight-loss “Consumes” Jenny’s life; it’s about how she transitions from one obsession to another, adding more to her plate with each chapter, following an arc similar to what she experienced in real life. This development causes the non-weight-loss elements of the game to become increasingly significant as the narrative unfolds.

What attracted you to the game’s artistic style? What intrigued you about creating something playful and engaging around this serious topic?

Hsia: The current artistic style is largely the same one I employed to prototype the initial minigames. Back then, I focused on keeping the decision-making simple: limiting the color palette, using the pencil tool in Photoshop, and a few brush sizes. What was crucial for me at that stage was making the prototype functional, so I had limited time to refine the artistic aspect. As I continued developing the game, the visual style evolved as well. I believe many artists would concur that as they develop personally, so too does their artistic expression.

When Kelly joined the project to assist me with backgrounds, it was a wonderful opportunity to see what they could achieve with my ideas from the prototyping phase. Given that this game has been in development for several years, you can see how the character is illustrated in various styles. It’s challenging to stick to one style without feeling the urge to revisit it, and I like to think we combined my earlier art with the new artistic styles. I also enjoy joking that the artwork appears as if it was created by a full team of around twenty people, but in reality, it’s just two artists who have labored on the project for many years, whose styles have continuously evolved and who felt too lazy to redo the older scenes.

Likewise, why was it essential for you to examine weight-loss in a darkly humorous manner? What advantages and challenges arose from discussing this topic with a sense of bleak humor?

Hsia: Life can be quite dreary. Especially at this moment. So many things feel hopeless. Don’t you want to make a few jokes before the end?