Game

Concept

Life’s Hectic ® is a registered video game of El Salvador. Life’s Hectic tells the story of a reborn soul who is hunted and embarks on a dangerous adventure. Set in a tropical environment, Life’s Hectic follows the journey of a young boy and unknowing heir to a spectacular power. He must overcome tremendous challenges and persevere against great evil, threatening the existence of life.

You’ll engage in well-balanced, turn-based battles and embark on quests to save your country from destruction. Fight strange creatures, develop skills, and build relationships with people.

Design & Art Direction

Life’s Hectic is a video game classified under the category of neoromance where the objective revolves around the player developing relationships between several characters with a focus on a “choose your own adventure” as a visual novel.

As Life’s Hectic development began, the user interface changed before reaching a closer approximation to the desired version. Below are the four concept arts that changed to increase replay-ability, legibility, and user experience.

Interactions with complex characters and the branching of dialogue trees present the possible responses that the player can choose, which in turn influences during later conversations.

During the game, the player will have to manage several technical elements, such as time, day-night cycle, mental health, various statistics such as appearance and charm that can be promoted through exercise or being a responsible student.

A passion meter increases and decreases continuously depending on the decisions of the player, which invokes positive or negative consequences.

My inspiration came from role-playing social simulators like Persona 4 Golden, A Dark Room, True Love, and Love Hina. Portraying drama in storylines and character development is an important aspect.

Samuel Portillo designed the cover art of the first issue of Life’s Hectic from Es El Fin, which was mentioned on Behance. It represents the delicate balance between opposites.

I wanted to make Life’s Hectic black and white with minimal options and things to do. It was still already pretty complicated but I wanted to add more.

In this second prototype of the UI, I wanted the user to be able to see all the elements on the screen visually, but it ends up being visually contaminated.

In the third design, I’ve decided to clean up the UI even more and add colors to make it more vibrant. I wanted to make something minimal but colors just bring life to everything. The game felt so gloomy before.

Finally, I made up my mind and decided it should show a first-person perspective. The UI changed once again but maintained the minimalistic approach I desired from the beginning. The background is now illustrated and visually attractive, it makes you want to play Life’s Hectic.

Read Life’s Hectic Manga Online

To fully visualize my ideas, I began to write an over 300 page novel about Life’s Hectic story. I later began production on the manga to see my creations come to life. You can read the first chapter of the manga online for free.

Improving Development

Developing video games takes time and requires resources. I’ve gained a ton of experience producing on my own for the past couple of years. There have been ups and downs along the way but I’ll never stop working on Life’s Hectic ® until I see my vision completed. I hope you’ll be patient and wait for that moment to come like I am! ☺️