Author: Irene Weng

thatgamecompany is an independent game company founded in 2006 by two friends from USC, Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago. All of their games are rather minimalist and visually aesthetic, and the company aims to create games that emotionally provoke and stimulate players.

flOw

flOw is a simple game in which you are an organism swimming around and eating things as you dive deeper, and there are multiple organisms you can turn into. there are no instructions, you’re just dropped into the space and left to figure out how to navigate and progress.

Flower

Flower again focuses on the aesthetics more than anything else, but with a bit more direction. You start off as a single flower petal and control the wind, and the goal is to collect other petals to fly around and “activate” as many flowers as possible. When you’ve completed a section the area blooms, and as you progress through different stages of the game more infrastructure and technology appears in each environment.

Journey

Journey has the most narrative and goal-oriented qualities of the three games, you play as a wanderer in the desert going on some kind of quest. There are no instructions but different creatures help/harm you along the way and much of the game is spent trying to accurately navigate the environment and strategize how to move forward. You can also run into other plays in the game, there’s no communication besides sending a symbol to each other but you can help accomplish tasks together.

Mac Build

Use the up/down arrows to control the brightness and weather to simulate the effects of seasonal affective disorder.

I’m really sorry, this is terribly incomplete.

I want to create an environment that adjusts based on light sensitivity, with the intent of simulating the feelings associated with seasonal affective disorder. The analog input would be a light sensor of some sort, a simple example that comes to mind is a photocell.

The scene would start out with a very bright, sunny day, in a peaceful outdoor scene with a calming atmosphere. As less light is detected, the scene will slowly become more tumultuous and stormy and transition indoors to an empty room, fading to black when the sensor reads no light.

 

I tried to play with the lighting to make a floating, space-like scene, with some extremely bright objects and other parts receding into darkness. I particularly liked how the gargoyle’s wings resemble a halo of light behind it.

& extra fun with textures:

Club Penguin is designed to be a social kids’ game where the main focus is interaction via chat, multiplayer games, and igloo hangouts. I decided to make a penguin and pretend to be a NPC instead, standing in the same place and repeating the same preset message, “Where are the magical snowflakes?” Some other players thought I was looking for a specific item or place for a quest and asked if I needed help, others got mad and started throwing snowballs at me.

 

It me!

I don’t have an updated portfolio but I have some recent video work here.