Buster's

Role: UI/UX Designer and Programmer

Team Size: 8

Time frame: 8 months

Language/Engine: Unity and C#

Prototype build from 3/15/2025. Set for May release:

Windows 98 and VHS Motifs

Buster's takes place inside of a video rental store in the 1999's. The goal with creating the UI was to emulate the look and feel of the Windows 98 and VHS menus as an homage to the time. This involved recreation in Adobe Illustrator and/or outside sourcing depending on the asset needed.

Choices were made throughout on how common features of visual novels could be adapted to not only "make it work" with the aesthetic, but also make it make sense. For example, I chose for visualizer on characters' respective opinions on the player to utilize a settings slider and have the character's name replace what would be a menu header.

Similarly, with the Main Menu pictured above, VHS icons were chosen based off the content of the button. I decided not to make the text fully reflect VHS menus because there was not a strong enough association with what buttons were necessary. For example, the continue button has the fast forward symbol because the association was strong enough in terms of skipping forward in the game, but not enough for the player to understand if the text was "Fast Forward."

Yarn Spinner

The project utilized the Unity package Yarn Spinner for visual novels. I wrote the integration that allowed it reference our C# scripts. This included connecting the click of a choice to trigger both the character's stored opinion of the player and the notification of a change in the character's approval.

Alongside this I created comprehensive documentation for this process. This was so that the team's non-technical writers could easily copy and paste commands into Yarn Spinner as they wrote, without needing to dive into the C# scripts.