A 2D game in which the player with a limited social battery attempts to navigate through and escape from a party. The game is intended to be lighthearted and comical in nature but reflects reality to some degree. For introverted audiences, it is a relatable but also idealized world where they can stand up for themselves and not have to go with the flow of social norms. For others, it provides an exaggerated but somewhat realistic perspective to how such social settings can look like to introverts. It also contains underlying critiques on the absurdity of social conventions and draining nature of shallow human conversations.
Play GameHere are some early sketches of characters, attack patterns, game mechanics, and world aesthetic.
The first part of the game is a platformer, where the player faces an overwhelming amount of enemies attacking them with small talk. The player can defend themselves with their death stare, which silences enemies and freezes them in place, but only temporarily. There are also other introverts hiding along the way, and saving them increases the effectiveness of the player’s attack.
Near the exit, the player encounters the final boss – the Social Butterfly – and has to fight it through a dialogue system. As the boss relentlessly continues a shallow conversation, the player is given different options of responses that inflict various amounts of damage. Ultimately, they will have to get out of the conversation before their own social battery runs out, so they can successfully leave the party.
The characters are intentionally designed to be generic and abstract personas instead of specific individuals. They all take the silhouette of slimes, which are often the most common creatures in role-playing games. The design of introverted characters focuses on their eye (reflecting their observant quality), while that of extroverted characters focuses on their mouth (representing their verbal expressiveness).
Here are screenshots of the final game and instructions for how to play.
try it yourself
