「看不见的线」毕业生专访｜Lucas：把成长经历做成一场可以被“游玩”的故事

Characters in games level up through clear experience bars.

But growth in real life rarely comes with a visible progress indicator.

Sometimes it is simply the courage to speak first, an unexpected friendship, or a quiet afternoon when you suddenly realise just how far you have already come.

For this year’s The Invisible Thread Graduation Exhibition, Lucas chose to transform his own experiences of growing up into a story that can be “played” through game design.

Rather than constructing a wildly imaginative fictional world, he wanted to place real emotions, relationships and personal changes into the game itself.

Because to him, things that truly happened are already powerful enough to move people.

For this graduation exhibition, Lucas presented three game design projects developed from different perspectives.

Together, these works explore themes of humanity, relationships, growth and connection, while reflecting his ongoing interest in how games can carry narrative and emotional expression.

Medium: Cardboard, Acrylic Paint

This is a card-based strategy game set against a backdrop of dark theology. Players must maintain a fragile balance on the brink of ecological collapse. The power of Angels is freely wielded by humans, raising the question of whether these divine beings have fallen from objects of faith into mere tools. Meanwhile, Demons lurk among the crowd, provoking suspicion and greed.

The core of the game lies not in a contest of divine powers, but in whether players are willing to sacrifice innocent companions when resources become scarce — revealing the distortion and collapse of human nature under extreme circumstances.

Medium: Cardboard

On an alien planet ravaged by gravitational tides, the forest-dwelling sub-humans and their desert-surviving counterparts once regarded each other as mortal enemies. They held different beliefs and opposing worldviews. However, when extraterrestrial lifeforms threatening to consume the planet descend upon them, the two tribes are forced to break a thousand-year divide.

《Other Self》｜把成长经历做成一场可以被 “游玩” 的故事

Other Self is Lucas’s featured project in this year’s graduation exhibition, inspired by his own real experiences growing up.

Through narrative and interactive game design, he attempts to transform ideas of “connection, change and self” into a coming-of-age story that players can personally experience.

From the very beginning, Lucas chose not to build a complicated fictional universe. Instead, he transformed his own experiences into the foundation of the game’s narrative.

The story follows how meeting different friends and teachers gradually helped him grow from someone introverted into someone more willing to express himself.

As the story unfolds through character interaction and map exploration, players slowly enter the protagonist’s inner world. Emotions and changes that are often difficult to describe gradually become tangible within the game.

What Lucas hopes players feel most is the protagonist’s transformation throughout the journey — a transformation that reflects his own lived experience.

For him, one of the most memorable parts of the process was learning entirely new creative tools from scratch.

It was also through this experience that he truly understood, for the first time, how a game is built from nothing.

It was only a moving character on a screen, but to Lucas, that was the moment the project truly came alive.

And the character itself carries traces of him. Its appearance, expressions and emotional state were all created using himself as reference.

从 “想做游戏” 到 “想表达什么”

游戏对他来说，不只是娱乐，更像是一种能够让人进入另一个人世界里的方式。

随着游戏推进，角色状态、地图互动与人物关系不断变化，而这些变化，其实也对应着他自己的成长过程。

他相信 AI 可以生成故事，但无法替代真实经历带来的情感。