Jenny Jiao Hsia, creator of the indie game Consume Me, identifies primarily as a visual artist and finds verbal expression challenging. Consume Me, a coming-of-age life simulation game, draws from her personal experiences with dieting and eating disorders and is designed to feel raw and human. The game originated from prototypes made during her studies at NYU Game Center, where she developed a unique prototyping toolkit. The final release, which took nearly a decade, maintains its original visual style, enhanced by artist Kelly Jie En Lee's contributions.
"I hate words," she tells me. "I'm so bad at expressing myself through words, and I want to get a lot better at it because I'm making TikToks right now, and I've realised I'm not good at figuring out what to say on the fly consistently. So I think a lot about communicating things in pictures or storyboards."
Consume Me is certainly very visually distinct, as a light-hearted coming-of-age life sim that's based on Hsia's own experiences with dieting and eating disorder as a teenager, played out like an RPG with WarioWare-style minigames.
I guess I didn't want to come up with a new art style for every single minigame, so a lot of the time I would fall back on these rules that made it easy for me to not have to think about making assets.
Although it's been almost a decade between the prototypes and the final release, there hasn't really been a significant change visually, although they enlisted artist Kelly Jie En Lee, who created much of the background art, which complements the existing aesthetic.
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