Fantasy Makeover

Context

A makeover game about building an eye. You paint the iris by radius, smudge the colour outward to make it read as an iris, then move on to the pupil and to effects. The whole game is user interface.

The whole game rests on one effect: a pencil smudge that spreads

The iris

The player drags a pencil from the centre of the eye outwards and the colour has to spread.

Four things had to be true at once: the colour genuinely deforms, the length of the smudge stays under control, the input is read as a direction rather than a tap, and the result matches what the producer and the game designer pictured.

Shaders would have given the best-looking answer, and I could not find a way to marry them to reading player input and deforming the image in parts. So I dropped them.

What shipped uses the deformation tool of an asset that already knew how to stretch colour, driven by hidden tweens and points across the eye: the input direction picks the animation, the speed of the input drives how far it plays.

Custom eye effects went the other way and were done in shaders, with their cost watched on the target device.

Everything on screen is UI, so every motion had to be animated by hand

Volume

Because the game is entirely UI, everything that happens has to be animated by hand — there is no world to carry motion for you.

That meant a system for switching windows and moving between the stages of painting an eye, and a large amount of animation work behind it. Not hard, but it was most of the project.

Worth calling out

I built this one end to end — gameplay, menus, progression, shop, skins, tutorial, ads and store builds. These are the parts worth naming.

The eye

• Painting by radius, the smudge that turns colour into an iris, pupil selection and custom effects.
• The evaluation, with the lead, of which drawing asset to build on — the one already proven in another project in the studio.
• Sprite and texture optimisation, with as much as possible moved into atlases alongside the designer.

The interface

• Window and stage switching for the whole game.
• The animation pass over everything on screen.

More from the game

Project facts

Year

2025

Role

Unity Developer

Team

Three-person pod — game designer, artist, me

Scope

Solo developer, concept to release

Studio

Vira Games

Engine

Unity, C#

Platform

Android · Google Play and Amazon Appstore

Target device

Amazon Fire 7 · 1 GB RAM

Painting

Built on Paint in 2D, the asset the studio had already proven on another title

Structure

Canvas-driven UI, with sprite renderers outside the canvas

Where to see it

Amazon Appstore ↗ · listed as Fantasy Makeover

Tools & techniques