You deserve a break. You deserve to luxuriate. You deserve…to get your nails did. Be fierce, be playful, be a work of art. And when you’re done, marvel in your creation and take those hands out into the big beautiful world.
Polished: An Intensely Relaxed Nail Salon Experience is a game that takes you to the salon to sit still, paint carefully, and try to give your nails the perfect finish–if you can be graceful enough. But don’t worry, even if you mess up, you’ll still look like a million bucks.
Polished was developed as part of the I WILL MAKE YOU A BETTER PERSON project, where team members used non-hierarchical development processes and community of care ideological frameworks as starting points for research-creation. The game expresses some of the core thematics that arose from our group project, such as luxury, self-care, and the pressures of burnout, while still being small, silly, and easy to play. The process work behind the game’s creation was presented in a performance/hybrid panel at CGSA 2019, and abridged summaries of the talk are available on the TAG blog.
Design Team
Programming & Implementation: Dietrich Squinkifer
Color Art & Layout: Rebecca Goodine
Sound Design & Avatars: Kalervo A. Sinervo