Fine Line

You wake up, get to class, grab lunch and sit through a lecture. Every step is a small choice: bike, drive or take the bus; pack a lunch or order in. None of them feel like a big deal on their own. That’s the point.

The day ends in 2080, in a crowded city shaped by millions of those small choices, because climate change was never one person’s fault. We built it for the UN Sustainable Development Goals track, in a pencil-sketch style that feels more like flipping through a notebook than sitting through a lecture.

We were a team of four designers, so the line between “design” and “build” was mine to cross. I owned three things:

1. 01

   The art. hand-drawn, pencil-style scenes, drawn with my teammate Avia Wen in layers so they could move independently in code

2. 02

   The interface. choices, hover states and on-screen UI, designed to belong in the sketchbook

3. 03

   The build. the frontend and the backend logic that runs the scenes, the choices and the ending

Every scene starts as a pencil drawing in Procreate. My teammate Avia Wen and I drew every frame together: backgrounds, characters and props on separate layers, each exported as its own transparent PNG, so the code could stack, swap and animate them without redrawing anything.

One drawing, many states. The opening scene reacts before you’ve chosen anything: hovering a way to get to school highlights it, and the character changes to match the avatar you picked.

frame 1/6

Hovering over a choice previews it in the scene. Instead of reading three options in a menu, you see each one play out in the drawing before you commit, so the choice feels like part of the world instead of a form to fill in.

PackedBuyTakeout

AI data centresUrban planningLivestock

Every choice leads to its own drawn outcome. Biking down the greenway, sitting in highway traffic and riding the bus each look and feel different, and so do the three lunches. Nothing pops up to say “wrong answer”; the drawing just shows you what happened.

The commute

Bike

Drive

Bus

Lunch

Packed

Fast food

Delivery

We didn’t want to end on “it’s your fault.” A game that guilt-trips one player teaches them to stop playing. So the day ends with you dozing off in a lecture and waking up in 2080, in a city crowded with everyone else who made the same small choices.

Dozing off

2080

Thank you to my amazing teammates Dora Hu, Avia Wen, and Sukhraj Chane for making this experience so memorable and fun, even as I fought the worst fever and sickness ever 🫶