Art of Distress

[artofdistressgames]

Creating a Company Part One: Trademarks

Here at Art of Distress we're preparing for Grid Zine Fest in Salt Lake City in March 2026! While Sharif is busy working on publishing his book and writing zines, my task is to get Unicorn Crossing on Steam so we can gather wishlists at the event. My first task: getting us a trademark.

Let me rewind a bit. I first started my day by researching how to get on the Steam Store. To do this, you first have to become a member of SteamWorks. If you already have a Steam account (who doesn't?) it's as easy as logging in. From there I went to my Dashboard and started the publication process - but I soon ran into this message:

Whoops! In order to start this process I needed Art of Distress to be its own entity - something we haven't done yet. I determined the following steps to make Art of Distress its own company: - Trademark Name - Register Business - Get Federal and State Tax ID numbers - Report to Beneficial Ownership Information - Create a Bank Account Note that I derived this list from researching on the US Small Business Administration's webpage. I'd suggest anyone making a small business check out their webpage for details. Today's task (and blog post) is Getting Our Name Trademarked! To start the trademark process, you'll want to create an account on the USPTO's (US Patent and Trademark Office) Trademark Center. Next, search the trademark database to make sure no trademarks already exist under your name (if they do, it's back to the drawing board, sadly). Then, Apply to register a trademark.

This is a long process, so I'll be hitting the highlights of decisions you'll have to make and info you'll have to provide. First, you'll have to select your Application Type. For us that meant Trademark/service mark, principal register. This will cost you $350 but will ensure that your company's name is trademarked and cannot be used by others. You also have an option to choose "Less Common Trademark Applications" - this does not apply to trademarking a games company. Next, you'll have to input the trademark owner's information. The trademark may have multiple owners (for us, AoD is owned by both Katie and Sharif), but each owner will need to supply their name, address, phone, and email. Next, you'll decide whether to protect wording alone, a trademark logo, or "something else" (like a 3D product or sequence). Wording alone will protect your name regardless of font, size, color, etc, whereas choosing a logo will protect the visual elements of your name, such as a logo or font/color design. The website gives these examples for logos:

We chose to protect wording alone, for two reasons. (A) We want Art of Distress to be trademarked in whatever way we use it and (B) we don't have our logo quite ready yet. Then it's time to enter your trademark, exactly as you want it protected. This does not include symbols such as ™, ℠, ® and © - just the name. For us that was Art of Distress. You may be wondering - why not Art of Distress Games? I hinted at it above - Art of Distress isn't just going to be publishing games! This year we're going to be publishing Sharif's flagship book, The Art of Being Expendable, as well as a handful of zines filled with short stories, comics and poems. We want to keep the name Art of Distress open to publish any creative works we create, not just games. Finally, you'll need to Identify the Goods and Services your trademark will be providing. This is where the money comes in. The website offers a search function of the Trademark ID Manual to help you choose the type of services your trademark will offer.

We searched for "Publish" and "Game" to find what we were looking for. You can add multiple descriptions to your trademark - for example we chose: - Publishing of Books, Magazines (Class 041) - Multimedia Publishing of video game software (Class 041) Note the Class number on each description. Each unique class number you choose will cost $350 to trademark. To give an example from the image above, all items related to the act of publishing media are in Class 041. However, Downloadable Desktop publishing software is in 009 - being a software program is different from publishing software. It's a tricky distinction. What's important to remember is choosing descriptions from a second class number will cost you another $350 to file. In our case, Art of Distress is the publishing house that will produce all our zines, books and video games. It is not in itself a video game. For this reason we didn't select "009 - Goods - Downloadable video game programs". In the future we will probably trademark Unicorn Crossing (or rather, its final name) as a game itself. And that's pretty much it! After filling out all that info and making your decisions you'll be asked to review it all and then be forwarded to a payment site. Once you're done you can return to USPTO's Drafts and Docket page to view all trademarks in review. Your trademark is not officially in effect until reviewed by an examining authority - a process that unfortunately can take 5-10 months! Despite the long wait time, you should pat yourself on the back for making it this far and submitting your trademark. And by that I mean I'm patting myself on the back for submitting our trademark! The next step in creating a company is registering the business - that is, creating an LLC. We're waiting until the new year to do this to make sure we're covered for all of 2026. And with that.... see you next year!

P.S. Important information regarding scammers! Unfortunately signing up for a Trademark means your information has to go public. This creates an opportunity for scammers to find your info and try to scam you for money. About five days after registering AoD's trademark, I got a phone call to the number I registered with the trademark. The person on the other end said they were from USPTO, and quoted to me ALL MY PERSONAL INFORMATION that had gone into the trademarking process. Email, address, phone number, full name, trademarked name, etc. They even knew that I hadn't added a logo with my trademark, just the name! They said to hold my trademark for 14 years I would have to pay them $540, despite paying $350 during the original trademarking process. They sent me an email (to the address they already had on file) with a link to pay them for holding my trademark. Luckily I smelled something fishy so I hung up and did some research.... this is a common scam that scammers pull about five days after anyone summits a trademark request. Be aware, be informed! Make sure you don't get scammed out of your money when filing a trademark! The government should never call you out of the blue asking for money - you should be able to perform all transactions on the official USPTO website.

[bagelcollie]

[bobcat-pie]

we were critiquing character designs in class today, when there was a really good one, and someone turned to the artist, holding their laptop. the screen of which just said "WOULD" in big trackpad-drawn letters

[artofdistressgames]

I actually just did a character design for Unicorn Crossing and this was the reaction.

[artofdistressgames]

Big News! The Solstice Program Begins!

Art of Distress is officially a part of Code Coven Create’s Solstice Program! Code Coven is a fantastic online community of marginalized game devs coming together to build games. Their Solstice Program is an accelerator where teams are provided with the resources needed to build a pitchable prototype in 3 months.

The official announcement can be found on Code Coven’s website. Very excited to announce Art of Distress’s participation in the Solstice Cohort! During the next 3 months we’ll be focusing on creating a pitchable prototype of Unicorn Crossing, while taking advantage of Code Coven’s online community, classes, labs and mentors.  Stay tuned - these will be a busy next few months but we’ll keep you posted!

[artofdistressgames]

How to Survive Your First Day as a Writer for Video Games Made with Twine

We have a YouTube channel, and I made a comprehensive tutorial for the basic features of Twine.

I had to learn Twine when we first started writing for Unicorn Crossing. After awhile Katie decided against implementing Twine in Unity, and we moved on to Yarn Spinner, which is more complex and easier to implement. However, this past spring I freelanced for a company that did use Twine as their means of handling dialogue branching. That was great for me because Twine is my easy mode. It’s how I learned.

I wanted to move on from this job when it was contract renewal time but also pass the torch to someone new. The problem was that job needed someone who understood mental health, could write for the age group, was a good writer, and had the technical skills in Twine to actually write the dialogue for the game.

So I made this video to try to give my writer friends that skillset that they could use to try to take over the job.

[artofdistressgames]

DevLog In Retrospect Part 3

And the final devlog in retrospect in this series! Technically I haven’t caught up with myself yet (this devlog was written in September of last year and there’s more where that came from). BUT I figured this would be a nice end to the series, as this was the last time I fiddled around with a story editor that didn’t make it into the project for realsies. I really hope I don’t have to eat those words later on...

9/20/2020

This weekend I started by trying to integrate AdventureCreator into my project. I didn’t really like it, had a slow time picking things up, it felt rigid and brittle and a lot of little components I could make on my own. So I decided (hopefully the last time to make this decision?) that I’d make my own systems for navigation, inventory, stats, mood, text, etc. I’d already made a lot of these anyway. Conversation trees are still a big fear for me, but I’m back on the side of parsing a twine html file to create Unity-friendly conversation trees [note from future Katie: I actually landed on Yarn Spinner soon after this instead].

I added the biped version of Ali, as well as the backgrounds and props for hallway, bathroom and kitchen (probably not all but a lot). I revisited the navigation controls. Previously Ali could only move on a 1D axis: left and right, but I wanted him to be able to move forward and backward too. I took a quick detour into unity’s Nav Mesh land, but that requires faking a 2D mesh with 3D components and rotating everything 90 degrees…. Decided it wasn’t worth it.

Now when you click on the floor and let go while still on the floor, Ali will move to that location. If you drag your mouse outside the “floor” object, Ali will move to the spot your cursor left the floor collider. Note: As it stands right now, floor is buggy. You can see in Apartment.unity the bedroom has 3 floor panels. You can click, drag, see the pointer, and move Ali around. But ultimately I’d want there to only be 1 floor panel per room. At the moment my attempts to remove 2 of the floors and/or resize them result in non-functional floor. I’m wondering if it’s the mask or Sorting Layer???

I added in Waypoints and Hotspots this time around. Waypoints are like UCInteractables, but instead of bringing up text they fade out the scene, move Ali to a hotspot, and then fade back in. Hotspots are like starting positions for Ali – it’s where he enters rooms. They also include a direction for which way he points when he is transported to that hotspot. This allows the player to move from room to room. I still need to implement some sort of Follow Camera.

A note on scene architecture: a unity scene should contain one chunk of the game. For instance, the scene I’ve been working in is the Apartment, and the bedroom, bathroom, hallway, kitchen and livingroom are all included. Ali jumps from room to room using the UCSceneManager’s ChangeToRoom command.

Finally, I committed to github and pushed this doc to SugarSync.

Summary of DevLogs && Seeking Out the Holy Grail of Story Creation Tools

While researching story creation tools I came across a few nuggets of information. One: most large studios have their own narrative builder tools that they built/own in-house. Two: smaller game devs often use platforms like Ren’py, Game Maker Studio or RPG Maker, which feel limiting in terms of what the programmer can and can’t do. Three: outside of these sources, there are TONS of story editor tools, of varying degrees of writer-friendliness, programmer-friendliness, price and availability. It feels like every time I google anything related to narrative games I get bombarded with 3 or 4 new game creation tools I hadn’t known about prior. This space is inundated, yet no solution feels perfect. Everything has a learning curve, and it’s not until you’re deep into the learning curve that you realize the shortcomings of the tool you’re using. You end up with a lot of false starts, trying to settle into a tool while knowing there are tons more options out there. At one point we were even considering writing our own parsing system from Final Draft to Unity. Needless to say, did not continue on that tread. Our small team consists of a programmer comfortable in Unity and a writer proficient in Twine. We want more control over systems than tools like Adventure Creator or GameMaker allow. We’re also fans of a game called Night in the Woods - built using Yarn Spinner and Unity. So eventually that’s what we settled on. 10 months later, things are going well. The tool-finding process also taught me something about myself. I’ve been in the industry for years and am the lead programmer for Art of Distress. But I still doubt myself every step of the way. I’d make a big decision - let’s use Adventure Creator! - and take two steps in and wonder - Did I make a mistake? Is this wrong? Is there something better? Am I dumb, or a lesser programmer for using this tool instead of something else? I’m still questioning my choices, even now, trying to re-google things I read a year ago and finding yet MORE tools I could’ve chosen. I’d call this impostor syndrome but I’ve been told to stop feeling like an impostor I should stop calling it impostor syndrome.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ What I’ve learned:  - Even if you’re afraid that you’re doing the wrong thing, pick a path and stay on it, at least for a while. At some point you have to stop second-guessing yourself and start building. If you run into a problem and need to roll back a decision you made, it’s much better to do that than to keep waffling forever and never getting anything done. TL;DR: don’t be a coward!

[artofdistressgames]

DevLog In Retrospect Part 2

This time I can actually say #throwbackThursday! At least until the clock rolls over...

From April to July 2020 I kept flip-flopping between implementation ideas. Sharif knew Twine, so I knew I wanted a story importer that accepted Twine files. I looked into writing my own parser to translate Twine to Unity, but as it happens with most programming projects I stopped myself 2 minutes in to ask “hasn’t anyone else done this before? I don’t want to remake the wheel...”

Over the course of months I looked at a handful of different solutions - AdventureCreator and Dialog System for Unity are mentioned in the logs below, but I had previously checked out Fungus as well. I kept running into this perpetual loop:

I need to make a dialog system that works for me and Sharif.

But why should I reinvent the wheel?

I’m looking at this tool I found and I like what I see... but...

I don’t know if it can solve these problems we need solved, and

It does a lot of stuff that I don’t need at the moment; that’s superfluous stuff I’ll need to sift through and modify, AND

In order to modify the system for my needs I’m going to have to get really familiar with the system, learn it frontwards and backwards

But why spend all that time learning a system when I could be writing my own?

Go to step 1!

There is a LOT of fear with starting an indie project that you want to see to its end. At least for me there is. I’m not sure if the fear is from not wanting to “let down” the project, or not wanting to take forever to finish the project, or worrying about poorly written code hanging over me for years to come, or because I have anxiety (or all of the above. Definitely all of the above). I can do game jam projects just fine - the code only needs to work for a weekend, you can write it fast and sloppy and once you’re done you can step away from a complete project and never have to look at it again. It’s a surprising amount of dopamine for just a few days of work.

All that project anxiety builds up in a self-fulfilling cycle. You don’t want to waste time so you don’t invest in learning new tools or writing prototypes. And so you research forever trying to make sure once you do put fingers to keys, you won’t waste time on mistakes. But you’re so afraid of making mistakes you just never start. And then you’ve wasted all this time doing nothing and you beat yourself up and reassert that you can’t waste any more time.... and the cycle continues. 

So while I was researching and hemming and hawwing over the most critical part of our game (i.e. dialog trees and branching story) I ended up working on other things. I wrote a navigation system. Built Ali’s bedroom. Made a state manager for his moods and a textbox manager and base classes for Interactables and a closet with 20 different outfit options. I set up the github and bought our domain name! I got a lot of stuff done while worrying about not getting stuff done.

4/19/2020

Fixed bugs in tap-to-move in bedroom scene of unicorn crossing

Broke out scripts into a MVC model & cleaned up scripts

UCPlayerController has a state that's an enum modifiable in editor

Scene Manager owns Navigation Manager and Text Manager           - Text manager controls the textbox and has defaults for normal/happy/sad textbox colors

Add UCInteractable to an object to make it clickable, can edit the normal/sad/happy text in editor to determine what gets shown when clicked on depending on mood

5/16/2020

Today I worked on setting up GitHub for the project, which led to buying the ArtOfDistress.com domain!

Unable to commit using GitHub, I'm not sure why?

I created a gitignore which minimized the number of files in the commit from 3K to 1.8K

But still unable to commit?

Starting from scratch with a new repository for a clean state. On gitub.com/account/organizations I started a new organization

But then I wanted the organization email to be @artofdistress 

On Domain.com I bought the domain artofdistress.com for 2 years

Created katie at artofdistress.com and sharif at artofdistress.com, set up email forwarding for myself

Setup git organization art of distress, and finally pushed the first commit of Unicorn Crossing!

7/11/2020

Today I looked at AdventureCreator. Read some of the guide, imported it into the game. I didn't want to play with it yet. Decided to work on creating a dialogue system from scratch.

I made a dialog tree system:

Imported text mesh pro

Created scripts ClickableText.cs, DialogueNode.cs, and DialogueTree.cs

Works on a node system

Added Messenger System by Ilya Suzdalnitski to the project - I didn't know that wasn't a thing unity just came with. Had to find it online, but at least it's simple and free. (this is a thing that happens when you work in the same codebase for years - you start taking for granted the tools your team uses daily)

The closet is a proof of concept of the dialogue system working, but so far it's just Read text -> Make decision -> Changes a variable and closes the text box. No multi-step conversations yet.

Looked at Dialog System for Unity (asset store). It's $80 and it feels like I could make it. The problem I keep running into is deciding what I want to spend time implementing myself versus what I want to spend time learning. I could learn to use your dialogue system, or I could make my own. Made some tie sprites and a system for changing out the sprites based on what the player is wearing. Added flavor text to all props because why not idk Removed colliders from floor and walls - they don't need to be clickable and it's interfering with basic navigation

Lessons learned from this DevLog:

1. Don’t be afraid to jump in. Didn’t I say something like this in the last post? Prototype early, make mistakes early and often. I’ve heard it dozens of times from managers, mentors and motivational speakers, but it took me months of ignoring their advice to realize just how crucial it was. 2. All progress is progress, and productive procrastination is still productive! I stressed for months over the dialog system, and beat myself up a lot over not making a decision sooner. But in the meantime I made a lot of crucial steps forward: setting up the project and repo and making my own systems. 3. It still counts as #throwbackThursday even if you finish on Friday. I actually didn’t learn that from this devlog, I’m just declaring it now.

[artofdistressgames]

DevLog In Retrospect Part 1

This is a #throwback post, or retrospective look at the decisions I made at the beginning of this project. It took me a long time to pin down exactly which technologies I wanted to use for Unicorn Crossing.... and honestly I still feel like I’m groping about in the dark, trying to find the best solution.  The fun thing about programming is that you learn and grow as you go. You want to start making early, and you want to start making mistakes early, so you jump into projects wanting to churn things out quickly.

But that backfires when down the line you realize you can’t work with the system you decided on 2 weeks ago, or when you learn a new design system that changes how you think about code.

The trial and error process is what prototyping is for. And if you learn anything from this post, know that prototyping is integral, and it’s ok to throw away your work if it means you learned something in the meantime. But when you’re an anxious mess working on your first big larger-than-game-jam indie child dream project, it’s really easy to look at all that work and see it as wasted time; time you could have been spending creating instead of groping about in the dark.

If I could go back in time to December of 2019, I’d probably tell myself to chillax, take my time, make sloppy code for the sake of experimentation and feel free to make TONS of prototypes. I’d also tell myself to invest in dogecoin earlier and stock up on toilet paper for the upcoming pandemic, but that’s irrelevant.  Instead, I get to ruminate on my early dev logs. Dec 30, 2019 Today’s Goal: Make headway on getting twine into unity. Sharif has written some scenes in twine already, and he’s comfortable with the software. I know twine exports to html - there must be an easy way to parse that into something Unity can use. But first, I looked around the web for solutions.

 - Found Cradle - plugin for unity that imports twine stories  - From website:        - Getting started:              1.  Download the latest Cradle release and install the package to your Unity project.              2.  Publish a story from Twine 1 or 2 (instructions) and drag it into Unity.              3.  Add the generated script to your scene.              4.  Use cues to script story interaction, or use the included TwineTextPlayer.  - Problem: Looks like Cradle supports Harlowe but maybe not Harlowe 2.0. I'm downloading Cradle using GitHub desktop, then will get Sharif to send me a twine project he wrote.  - So I got distracted because my computer's file organization is shit and I started planning how to reorganize  - I think the first step is determining what files I do have and where  - Or alternatively setting up a system and moving files there  - Anyway in the time I was thinking about organizing, Cradle finished downloading Notes from Katie 2021: In retrospect I can’t figure out why we didn’t go with Cradle. What I think happened was we saw it wouldn’t work with Harlowe 2.0, and I immediately started researching alternatives. Or I saw difficulties with Cradle and thought to myself “there must be an easier way” and then started looking for the easier way.  I was also afraid to try things out! As you can see in the dev log above, I got distracted pretty much immediately after hitting the Cradle download button. And the next dev log was written in April 2020 and had nothing to do with Cradle. And the next time I talked about a text-to-unity solution was July! In those months there was a lot of time for me to ruminate on how to develop a game with story / decision trees and do research into other technologies. There was a lot of time to get distracted by new, shiny technologies or design principles. If I could go back and do it again, I’d spend the time between December and July prototyping using Cradle instead of doing rumination on technology away from the keyboard. Lessons learned from this DevLog: 1. Prototype. Don’t be afraid to write messy, quick code in order to learn something! Even if that something is why you do or don’t want to work with a technology, that’s at least concrete knowledge you can use instead of nebulous rumination. 2. Don’t code for a day and break for a month. The things that change in a month, or 7, can be daunting. A month of work (day job) means a month of learning code from mentors and coworkers, and a month of improving design sensibilities. A month of rumination on technology means a month of thinking about code without testing it out for yourself - and making decisions on tech without knowing all the facts.

[artofdistressgames]

Ali Horn Later Designs

I’m not sure exactly what pulled the game out of the box. I think it was a combination of my career both taking off and collapsing. I think a lot of doors that were never going to open for me started to disappear. Doors that were opening for me were doing just that. However, somehow it seemed like there were fewer options when objectively everything was actually getting better. It’s just the perception of vanishing hope made me feel like I really needed to get going on something else. Something like this game.

Despite double masking from the start (over a year before officials started asking us to do so) I caught the coronavirus in June. The only place I went without a mask was the dentist where the hygienist complained about mask restrictions and spouted covid conspiracy nonsense the whole time. I quarantined with Katie who volunteered to be infected so as to keep my elderly parents from getting deathly ill. She never got symptoms. I didn’t have to be hospitalized, but I had to go to the ER a couple of times. At the best of it I felt pretty normal. At the worst I felt like I was definitely going to die. Worse that I was going to die without making anything worth a damn. I was taking an Visual Development class a few months later, where ultimately long hauler symptoms from covid created struggles to stay awake, heart problems, and cognitive issues that forced me to drop out of the class. But in the time that I was there, I got much better at design. Especially considering that wasn’t a character design class. Never managed to get into one of those so far. I’m currently 7th on the waitlist for one. Wish me luck! [Update! I got in! Thanks everyone! Your well wishes have slowed production! But we’ll get a better game for it!].

I turned some of these drawings into the visual development class, but I had to drop out shortly after due to symptoms and days spent fighting with my health insurance or going to doctor’s offices only to be told I was referred to them in error.

Out of school for a few months, I was able to just focus on the design for the game. To facilitate things, we made the characters bipedal. Katie brought up a concern when talking about what species tertiary characters were going to be. If everyone is bipedal then we can reduce how many walk cycles we need to make. Our plan is to make characters who might walk around nude (ish) and animate clothes on top of them in a new layer. If this isn’t what we hold onto for the game, it would still be easier to have a set walk to trace over when doing the hand drawn animation. Of course, we’ll have a couple of walks to give personality to main characters.

This is one set of many ideas Katie and I started working with as we started to find the soul and life of this game.

In between classes and still not satisfied with the unicorn’s look, I started asking around for resources for character design. Mostly what people told me was to take figure drawing classes (which I interpreted as build skills of proportion, gesture, anatomy, expressiveness, and design as it pertains to the body). But there’s something about character design that is not figure drawing.

I think the reason so many people just recommended figure drawing is because artists that have reached a plateau with figure drawing seem to then jump to design. I also couldn’t find any advice that wasn’t what is used for figure drawing: avoid twinning, pair up straights with curves, complex shapes with simple ones. But there was not much help on how to move from making the model a cartoon into making my own cartoon designs.

I started looking at model sheets from animated shows and films. I looked through them and saw key elements of advice for design. A lot of the design is about setting your own specific and consistent set of rules. With the help of the model sheet call outs, I got better at deconstructing the instructions. Not just “do this” but understand why the decision is being made. In a few days of study my designs grew dramatically. Below are a couple of pages of notes. You can probably tell which shows they’re from.

I think after these studies I found Ali Horn. Katie wants me to add the forelock back. I’m inclined to agree that the Superman curl has its appeal. Every time I try to take away a feature for my My Little Pony OC, Katie wants me to put it back, and I think she’s right to do so.

Also, right before the pandemic I had taken an animal drawing class. I wanted a design aesthetic that says I’ve drawn this animal before or that we’ve at least really looked at it. It was important to me that the designs implied animal anatomy. I didn’t want a quarter circle snout that could be exactly the same on every character. While that snout is cute, I didn’t want it for this game. The designs should be cute but somewhat real since the game is cute, but also very real.

Anyway, I’m trying my best. 

[artofdistressgames]

Ali Horn’s Early Origins

I did comics about being depressed as part of my master’s thesis. It starred my OC from the My Little Pony Fandom. My thesis was in fiction, but I turned in nonfiction memoir comics, fiction, and poetry because I’m a smart ass and my program encouraged cross genre study. This is a one off chapter of the depressed unicorn I named “Iambic Hexameter.”

The depressed unicorn image was something that I came to by writing a story in response to a classmate’s work. I gave him a critique that his abstract work needed some more to ground it. When aesthetic debate failed, I tried to write a story that mimicked his silliness while still being uniquely mine and more importantly as a proof of concept for my aesthetic theory. That brought me to “Unicorn Hunting” which would be published in Specs: Journal of the Arts. That classmate kind of wrote the story off and gave me condescending encouragement to “keep trying” or something like that. But it set in motion my aesthetic as it really was the first time I broke down what I believed artistically and then attempted to do it. This started my obsession with the sad, suicidal unicorn which ultimately was a stand in for my own mental illness.

It was this work in the realm of unicorns that had my roommate show me the reboot to My Little Pony. Fun fact: Art of Distress is a reference to the My Little Pony song “Art of the Dress” and our original project was a horror game for Chromecast we made for a game jam, not a mental health game.

The game “Unicorn Crossing” came up when Katie, Jeremy, and I were celebrating Jeremy’s birthday. Jeremy and Katie were talking about a game design concept that I think is now lost to time, but it gave me the idea for a depression simulator where you manage your mood, willpower, and social energies. We spent the rest of the day brainstorming on this...Okay, so we also went to Build-A-Bear.

Weeks later Katie, having had read my master’s thesis, kind of saw the unicorn as my depression comics pony. Here was Katie’s placeholder programmer art. (Katie and I have very much the same workflow in that we both like to start on paper and end in the computer.)

She even gave it my OC’s cutie mark and curly hair. There’s something really cute about this look. I was really tempted to ask Katie to just make the art. There’s something like a first love every time you meet your character for the first time. You’re tempted to think that this is the one, and Romeo and Juliet die for your teenage crush. You have to keep designing though. The next iteration was my putting slightly different proportions on Katie’s basic idea. I tried to remove some of the My Little Pony elements. Also the parts that were just my OC.

About a year after the initial idea we did a game jam where I started to work with a redesign. I was a writer trying to write cartoons. As a way of taking charge of my own destiny I started studying drawing and animation to expand my prospects. We scrapped this design when Jeremy said he didn’t like the beady eyes. I put kawaii eyes on and something didn’t work. Somehow Unicorn Crossing was lacking its soul. We were having trouble finding it from the points of view of visual design, gameplay, and story.

For a lot of reasons Unicorn Crossing kind of just went into a box. Seemed like Katie and I both needed to grow professionally, artistically, and mentally before we could guide this game back on track.

Everything seen here is not final game art. In fact, none of this early art will be used in final gameplay. To see the final game art (at least for now), you can see it here.

[artofdistressgames]

hello world!

Hi and welcome to Art of Distress’s dev log! Art of Distress is a teeny indie game team working on our first title - all in our spare time. Our game follows Ali Horn, a unicorn with mental illness who must learn coping strategies, overcome traumas, and gain resilience in order to wrestle his sanity and life away from the pressures that weigh on it.

Right now our team is comprised of:

Sharif, artist and writer extraordinaire who specializes in mixing high and low art and writing stories about sad animals

Katie (me!), programmer and game designer who loves when gameplay and message mesh in a way that make you go “ooooh I feel that!”

A game designer, who we’ll introduce once I’ve gotten his permission to introduce him! 

Here at Art of Distress Games we strive to mix fun and high art in games that guide, heal, and entertain while exploring the darker aspects of the human condition.

I’ll be using this site to keep a running devlog on my work on the game. My main tools on this project are C#, Unity, and Yarn Spinner. Although I’m an experienced game developer who’s seen my share of #startupLife, this is my first time embarking on a larger-than-game-jam game that’s my own! (And one I’m not getting paid for! #passionProject) I’m always learning new things, and I’ll try my best to share those discoveries with you. Anyway *raises glass of sparkling apple juice* here’s to indie game dev, passion projects, and depressed unicorns. Thanks for joining us.