A short and sweet fantasy visual novel about a wandering barista who meets a mysterious girl in a magical swamp. Reach multiple endings and deepen your relationships! Complete with stunning visuals, cutscenes, heartfelt music, and a fantastical new world!

* Cover art by Issy Wong

Dewdrop Cafe

Available for download on itch.io

— The Team —

Issy Wong - Creative Lead, Food & Cutscene Artist, Voice Actor

Brendan Kitchen - Producer, Lead Programmer

Elizabeth Liao (yidelia) - Art Lead, Character Artist and Animator, Programmer, Assistant Producer

Talia Yaser - Background Artist

Connor Green - Music, SFX

Michael Rhee - Lead Writer, Voice Actor

Ashley Lu - UI Artist & Designer, Cutscene Artist, Programmer, Voice Actor

Elijah Parmley - QA Tester

Nicholas Chong - Concept Writer

This project was created for our senior capstone at UCSC for the Art and Design: Games and Playable Media B.A. degree over the span of 20 weeks.

— My Contributions —

Role: Assistant Producer, Art Lead, Character Artist and Animator, Programmer

I concepted, illustrated, and animated all the character sprites used in the game.
I filled in for our producer and programmer while he was away by aiding with the implementation of the story, transitions, and functionality of the visual novel using Ren’Py, and by ensuring that the team was completing all the necessary tasks for the game in a timely manner.

Primary Softwares used:

Clip Studio Paint
Live2D Cubism
Ren’Py

Concepts

Early into the design phase of our game, we had planned for a cafe-running game, where you, as the player, would serve various customers, each a unique magical creature. At this point in our design phase, we had not yet decided on a setting, hence the character designs ranging from aquatic to celestial to forest-y. Later on, after assessing our team’s skillsets and with our time limit in mind, we decided to change our game to a visual novel and limited the amount of characters to just two to three (including the player character).

In line with the cafe-running concept, our player character was understandably, a barista. We had wanted the player character to have some form of underlying personal issues that the player would then learn about and help the character come to terms with them.

With this in mind, I drafted three different concepts for our main character:

A. A softspoken and timid character who will take time in order to open up. They are a good listener who is willing to hear you out.

B. A confident and chill character. You can confide in them with your problems and they will offer you some helpful words of wisdom, which may or may not be from experience, in return.

C. A happy-go-lucky barista. Dressed casually and with an air of cheery-ness about her, you never feel intimidated to talk to them. But underneath the bright smile, is a sort of loneliness that others will never see.

The characters: art and animations

Our final three main characters, with Kari being the player character, were illustrated and prepped for animation using Clip Studio Paint, and were animated using Live2D Cubism.