Shumi Come Home

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as UI and difficulty levels in Cook Serve Forever, the challenges of programming for 2D for Sweet Transit, physics-based animation in Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, and designing spatial inventories in dark fishing sim Dredge. In this edition, Noah Lone, solo developer on Shumi Come Home, shares with us how low-poly modeling combined with depth of field effects and custom shaders brought about the game's soft aesthetic. 

I’m Noah Lone, aka SomeHumbleOnion, and I’m the creator of the upcoming indie game Shumi Come Home! I’m currently solo-developing everything in the game aside from the music which is done by my good friend and talented composer FailPositive. I’ve been working on this game for over a year now and it’s planned to be my first commercial release. I started teaching myself game development shortly after graduating college in the Spring of 2022. The pandemic was very fresh and I wasn’t getting a job anytime soon, so I decided to go full force into my passion of making games!

To give a bit of context, Shumi Come Home is an exploration-adventure game with a more casual approach to the gameplay. You play as a tiny mushroom, Shumi, who was taken from its home and is trying to find its way back. Set in three different environments of an overgrown forest, long after humans have left this world, you’ll be free to explore at your own pace and take on different adventures to get closer and closer to home. Since the game has no combat or