Wistful

Wistful is a 3D low-poly exploration puzzle game set against the suffocating void of space. Players control a child astronaut navigating atmospheric sci-fi environments, solving environmental puzzles to progress through interconnected levels. My role covered the gameplay HUD, interaction prompts, and UI feedback built in Unity UI Toolkit, with reusableUI components authored.

Role

UI & Interaction Programmer (same team and role as Shatter)

Contributions

Built the gameplay UI and interaction system — HUD, menus, pause, end-of-level, and in-world interactable prompts.
Authored the project’s UI component library (panels, buttons, focus rings), reused across every screen so the visual language stayed consistent.
Built the interaction prompt framework the rest of the team dropped interactables into, so adding a new object that needed a prompt was a one-component job, not a new UI hook.
Integrated UI feedback into the puzzle-completion flow so visual confirmation fired at the same beat as the underlying state change.

Technical Challenges

Reusable UI components over one-off screens. Every screen authored against templates, with a small base class for lifecycle hooks; adding a new menu was a prefab, not a fresh design pass.
Interaction prompts that read across environments. The game moves through different environment and levels; routing prompts through an event entry rather than a per-frame transform read kept legibility stable as backdrops changed.
Reading feedback under low-poly constraints. With a deliberately minimal art style, the UI carried more of the atmosphere; a constrained palette and a small set of feedback motifs kept screens feeling part of the world, not bolted on.

Lessons Learned

Authoring UI components up front paid off the same way a design system does — once the components existed, every new screen was an assembly job and the visual language stopped drifting.
Treating interaction as a framework event (focus / unfocus / state-change) rather than a per-object script scaled better than wiring each interactable to its own UI hook.

Recognition

Selected for presentation at the 2022 UTS Tech Festival.

Playable demo: itch.io · Source: GitHub