Mewdy Miso: Jam Reflection & Next Steps

Super excited to share that Mewdy Miso was selected by the GDL Game Parade Judges as the winner of the Best Itch Page award! 🎉

Ranking from the jam page for Mewdy Miso: All Judges' Picks rank #1 & Judges' Picks - Best Itch Page rank #1

As the person behind the game and UI design, alogside the itch page creation, I’m so incredibly proud of the cosy, and polished presentation we pulled together - and beyond thrilled to see that recognised!

But this project was so much more than one page. It came together thanks to a passionate and creative team:

• Shoutout to Roh and Otoke for their gorgeous art assets and consistent style that made Miso and their wee flat charming and lively.

• Jay’s vocals for John brought an extra layer of warmth and personality to the whole experience.

• Thanks to Connor the games composition was fantastic, giving it an uplifting and cosy tone that really pulled everything together

• Massive thanks to Connie as well, who set up test plans and led the QA on the project, identifying lots of bugs that are currently being fixed post-jam

• Gabi was highly supportive, and excited by the project, achieving a lot as the sole programmer for the jam
  

What Went Well:

• Strong artistic direction and cohesive tone across visuals, sound, and UI gave good polish to the project

• Effective scope management, allowing us to finish a complete and polished vertical slice

• Great team synergy, clear communication and collaborative creativity made the process fairly smooth
  

What Could Be Improved:

• Some bugs and timing issues have impacted player experience for the submission build

• We were racing the clock in the final hours, which meant a few parts (especially interactions and polish) didn’t get the time they deserved
  

What’s Next?

We’re happy to announce that a new programmer has joined the team for post Game Parade development, and they’re already tackling bug fixes and refining the game’s inner workings!

This will mean smoother player interactions, some pacing improvements, and more functionality in the next build.

We’re also expanding the game beyond our bonnie kitty Miso, with plans to:

• Add alternative pet types (birds, dogs, rats, and more!)

• Introduce alternate backgrounds to reflect each pet type more

• Polish the user interface to further and improve UX, accessibility and responsiveness
  

This is still a passion project, being done around day jobs and other core commitments, but we’re excited to keep nurturing it, just like Miso nurtures your little in-game heart 💜

Thanks so much for playing, supporting, and cheering us on. And if you’re just discovering Mewdy Miso now, then welcome, there’s even more to come!

Cheers, Charlie (bsky) & Ren (bsky) Psssst, you should follow us on bluesky for more frequent content updates

UI Design for #LDJam 55

For this 72 hour jam, I worked with a lovely team from all over and it was an excellent time! Our producer Clover set up a wee intro call prior to the jam starting, to let us all meet and get introductions out of the way before the jam.

For me, the jam theme was announced at 02:00am on Saturday 13th. I chose to stay up, allowing me to sync with the team and contribute to the brainstorming and early design stages.

Early User Flow based on orignal game concept, the core game loop was later adjusted to avoid having any reaction pop-up's between rounds. Instead the screen was split with 1/3 showng the characters reactions!

Once we settled on a game concept, I created a quick user flow and shared it with the team, to see what would be needed from the UI side for the different scenes/screens we'd like to include in the project, to avoid working on anything we didn't need.

Above are the final UI scenes, I created a small and cohesive suite of assets including in-game HUD elements, a title-logo, a custom cursor, settings slider bar & handle, button with three states and three easily re-scaleable containers for pop-ups and menus. While on call with the team once we settled on a game concept, I created some super sketchy wireframes, to explore different approaches to user interaction and layout of elements.

The next day was focused on syncing up with the team, and with our character artist Micro, before developing a UI fitting the fantasy feel of their character work. I also created a background for the in-game scene, exported Micro's character expressions in-scale for the game, and used the character they created for the itch game page assets and in-game menu splash page.

Later also moving on to create a chibi of the main characters' familiar to follow the players cursor, an illustrated hand asset (based on the character design) and five colour coded spell orbs each with a unique symbol to make the game more accessible for colour-blind individuals.

Through the jam, I utilised the web colour contrast checker on the UI colour pallet I developed, ensuring that it met Level AAA for our container and text elements to ensure better accessibility.

WCAG Compliance Test Result

Our in-game text would be classed as Large sample text as the smallest text is larger than 24px.

I also created the cover, banner and page background assets used for the itch and Ludum Dare game pages, ensuring they showcased the character work from Micro well, and incorporating the spell orbs and some sketched scroll outlines, alongside the smoky effect from in-game onto the itch page background to tie it all together.

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In the end, we created a simple arcade style game, where you control Myoji's summoned goblin familiar inside their demi-plane. Rushing around to move spell orbs into and out of Myoji's path to help her pass her exam! We had a lot of fun working together on call via discord, so this was a really fun jam experience, and I'm excited to work on more jams with the team in the future! You can play Eyes on Myoji here or over on the Ludum Dare game page.