Claire Fingerhut
Technical Game Designer
REFRESH 寒い
Platform
PC
Tools Used
Unity, 3Ds Max, Premiere Pro, Photoshop
Roles
Game Designer, Gameplay Programmer (C#), 3D Artist, Graphic Designer, Video Editor, Sound Editor
Duration
12 days
Refresh 寒い is a Vaporwave-inspired soda machine simulation game.
Play as a soda machine fulfilling orders in a lonely retro-futuristic diner.
Fill cups with the correct order, place lids to lock it in, and use the tray to send the drinks off to an unknown recipient.
I worked on this project independently, loosely using a Vaporwave aesthetic game jam on itch.io as the guide. Vaporwave is an aesthetic style and music genre that involves themes of retro-futurism, liminal spaces, clutter, loneliness, and remixing existing ideas. The game uses music by Haircuts for Men, a Vaporwave DJ who makes unique songs with existing song samples. The screen on the left features video clips from the FIREWALKER YouTube channel.
I made this game to feel aimless, tranquil, a bit lonely, and just a bit janky, to give it a feeling of being aged. Click here to play on itch.io.
Responsibilities
▪ Designed and scripted gameplay, sounds, and animations
▪ Modeled all 3D assets
▪ Redesigned existing soda logos and created new logo designs to fit the fictional aesthetic
▪ Edited '90s Coke commercial to jitter, reverse, and loop
▪ Sourced and edited sound effects to be sublte and responsive
Key Features
▪ Order generation system that creates orders, displays them on the order screen, and reads them aloud
▪ Physics-based ice dispensing made to feel like slow, stubborn ice machines
▪ Soda pouring and cup filling
▪ Screen dedicated to tracking your current order, listing the size, drink, and ice/no ice
▪ Buttons to move cup back and forth, trash to dispose of the current drink, lids to finish the drink, and a tray to send in the order
▪ Decorative screen with channel changing to swap between looping clips
▪ Moving skybox and slowly bobbing camera to give the static scene a bit of motion
Graphic Design
Drink labels for the soda fountain. Vaporwave takes lots of aesthetic elements from 1990s Japanese imagery and design, so I incorporated that in the top two original designs.
I took older versions of the Pepsi and Sprite logos as the base and added some more maximalist elements. I made these labels with the intention of them being a focal point of the shot, and just like soda graphic design in real life, to tempt the player to use the machine.
Font and text design done for the game's title logo as well as the ad inside the game. I like the '90s and '00s metallic text style a lot, and with Vaporwave including lots of neon and glowing elements, I thought it would fit well. I wanted the Japanese text to contrast the english text, so I went for a much different font style.
Commercial edit used as the ad on the fountain machine. Since Vaporwave often pulls from existing media, I found an old Coke commercial that had a couple good shots that I could cycle between. I mixed the clips around and reversed them so they would blend together and loop seamlessly. I also added in my own logo text to make it seem like a recycled clip used without permission in a bespoke bootleg ad.