ONION FUTURE
Onion Future is an RPG in development for the Playdate, a retro-inspired handheld console by Panic.
We are exploring the use of the console’s crank control for unique interactions within the setting of a fable-like world, for instance using it to navigate menus, engage in combat encounters, and using it in overworld interactions like fishing and digging. Our goal was to develop the first major area of the game as a vertical slice with fully developed art, sound, story, and gameplay assets that deliver a cohesive experience from beginning to end.
Start Date: 1.13.25 Pre-Project Ideation End Date: 4.30.25
Story:
The player follows the Fox, who has received a summons from the king of the lands. Along the way the Fox encounters a variety of individuals, ranging from an inquisitive, soil-loving frog student to a brash cocky catfish bandit-leader as he makes his way towards the capital.
Here you can see some screen recordings of our final vertical slice.
Sleeping
Picking up items
Making morning coffee
Playing the song of fire
A warm fire
A walk outside
Fishing
Waterfall
Chopping Wood
Combat system
Process
As one of the two-pixel artists, I’ve had the opportunity to work on every aspect of the world’s visuals. We created everything you will see here from the big stuff like characters and environments, to textboxes, UI, and even fonts. All of our animations, tile sheets and characters are made using Aseprite and Pixquare. Below are some assets we created before implementation.
Animated chopping background
Menu page turn
How we layout our maps in Tiled
Map shown in Tiled
Play Testing
Throughout the project and as we continue production we have made sure to playtest our game with a variety of people and wide age range. This really helped us make sure we designed our control layout intuitively, and also helped us catch some bugs early on. Here you can see a trailer of our game’s progress two months in and some photos from our last playtest.
Nina Gamboni: 2D Artist Xinyu Li: 2D Artist Derek Wong: Programmer, Tech Designer Michael Wong: Producer, Sound Designer Ean McFadden: Game Designer Collin Rehmeyer: Programmer, Designer
Art done in Photoshop, Aseprite, and Pixsquare. Programming done using Lua and C.