Between semesters, three friends and I came together to start the development of a puzzle game around the concept of generosity. This was inspired by thatgamecompany’s recent game jam and their prompt. The team had plans that would interfere in participating in the jam, but we decided with the time we to work on a personal project.
The Desktop Wizard is a block-pushing puzzle game about helping people who seek to address their desktop-related problems. Platform around levels and use our little wizard mouse protagonist, Vesper’s magic mop, to push desktop icons into each other to create organized files.
This is an ongoing project.
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![Main Menu]()
1. Main Menu - Mockup
Once we decided on the premise and setting, I knew the main menu should be a computer desktop. I was primarily working on the UI scripting and layout, along with working on gameplay programming and puzzle design. Our lead artist created all the final UI art.
I created the mockup above with the layout and aesthetic from the team and me. Windows 95 and the 90s were a great point of reference for our vibe and visuals. The background seen above was a default Windows 95 background.
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![Main Menu - First Pass]()
2. Main Menu - Concepting
I continued concepting the main menu layout and landed on a more traditional desktop layout. It’s common for important desktop icons to be present on the left side of the screen, so I adopted this layout for our main icons.
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![Main Menu - Final]()
3. Main Menu - Current
A few things changed (besides the incredible art) for the main menu layout. Our lead artist had created a bold and playful test for demoing purposes. This led me to utilize the new playful text for our current main menu iteration. It breaks from computer desktop icon norms, but we did not want to limit our creative freedom too much.
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![Window Moving]()
1. Window Moving
To further enhance the desktop experience, I created a script that could be attached to any 2D object, allowing the player to move it via the mouse.
