Fading Embers

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  main menu

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  incense burning

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  gameplay

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  gameplay

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  gameplay

Inspiration

Inspired by the tale of "The Little Match Girl," Fading Embers is an interactive narrative game about a young Asian American woman within a dysfunctional family. Women and gender minorities are held to unreasonable standards in America, and these struggles are reflected in different ways within immigrant families. As a team that resonates with the experience of being Asian and a femme-presenting individual in America, we wanted to create a game that reflected our experiences growing up.

The role of a woman is to be caring and innocent, and when we step outside of the box, our "bad actions" are a disgrace to the family. Yet these same standards aren't applied to the men in the family. Fading Embers is a glimpse into what we and many others face in the world. What does it mean to be a good woman when you don't belong to one culture?

What it does

Fading Embers aims to shine a light on the first-generation Asian-American experience and present it in an impactful way.

How we built it

Tools we used:

• Unity (C#)
• Miro (storyboard)
• Google Drive (file sharing and management)
• Procreate (assets)

Challenges we ran into

Visual Novels don't traditionally implement interactions the way that we are used to. We had to learn a new way to use Unity's interface to be able to accomplish everything we wanted. This includes cinematic scenes, regular text dialogue scenes, and interaction scenes. This was the blunt of our challenges as we have never used Unity this way before, and essentially had to take parts of our own logic, combined with a tutorial video to create our demo.

When working on the project, we decided to split into two teams: development and design. During our process, both teams made sacrifices for ease, convenience, and time. This ended up creating issues later down the road when we began to combine our progress into one process. Both sides did not properly share what they had done, so we lost much more time trying to solve these issues which could have been used elsewhere if we had communicated originally. In the future, we plan to mediate this issue by discussing with each other any executive decisions we make that may affect the progress of the project and keep the whole team informed of both sides of the process and how everything works.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we are proud of our implementation and ability to work around the challenges we faced. We did not anticipate many of these challenges and learned to adapt our project scope to continue ensuring that we'd create a demo worthy of presenting.

What we learned

Overall, we improved our existing knowledge of Unity and C#.

What's next for Fading Embers

What we've shown is just a demo of a greater story. We hope to develop Fading Embers into a full game that further dives into our protagonist's tale.

Built With

• c#
• canva
• google-drive
• miro
• procreate
• unity