Hikâyemiz (Personal Gift)

Context

Hikâyemiz (“Our Story”) is a small, personal game I made for my girlfriend for our first anniversary. It retells how we met and got together, chapter by chapter, as a cute top-down pixel art game. She plays as herself.

It is not a commercial project and the repository is private. I am including it because it is a complete game made for a single, very specific player — and that audience shaped every design decision.

Design

• One player, one device. The game targets her iPhone in landscape, with touch only: a floating analog stick and one action button. Nothing requires a keyboard. A Windows build with mouse and keyboard exists only for testing.
• Small chapters, one moment each. A prologue and five chapters, each a small map to walk around with a single interaction or mini-game at its heart, then a short cutscene and the next chapter. The whole game ends on a simple ending card.
• The story stays true. Every event in the game happened. I kept one source of facts and never let the game add details that were not real.
• Warm, short and funny. Dialogue lines are kept to about two short lines so they read comfortably on a phone, with typewriter text, character portraits and a distinct voice blip for each speaker.

How It Works

The game is made in Godot 4 with GDScript.

• The writing is mine. I wrote all of the dialogue in one Turkish screenplay file. A tool turns it into the game’s dialogue data, and a validator checks speakers, moods and story flags before anything runs.
• One style, enforced by the tools. Maps and UI art come in through an import pipeline, and character sprites are pixel maps baked from data. A shared colour palette is enforced by the tools, so everything stays in one style.
• Content is data. Chapters, characters, dialogue and seats live in data files; each chapter is a thin scene built on a shared toolkit for walking, posing, emotes, dialogue, phone messages and transitions.

Result

The game is complete and playable from the title screen to the ending, on iPhone and on PC. I iterated on it through several rounds of my own device playtests — fixing collisions, depth sorting, camera framing and touch controls — until it felt right on the phone it was made for.