Every Breath

December 2025

ABOUT

Every Breath is a narrative-driven survival game about a child journeying with their ailing mother through a desolate landscape where every breath costs oxygen.

Players must balance limited oxygen resources with moments of emotional connection, choosing whether to conserve life or spend it on love. Each choice tests what it truly means to keep someone alive, both physically and in memory.

My Role

Lead Designer

My Responsibilites:

Collaborating with the team to set player experience goal
Designing paper game to prototype narrative and core loop
Designing levels in-engine
Co-writing dialogue scenes with narrative team
Assisting producer with assigning tasks
Overseeing digital prototype playtests and working with usability to organize player-feedback

The Team

Hongqian – Engineering

Sam Lupson – Production, Narrative

Trina Guharoy – Narrative, Design, Usability

Violet – Art, Design

Matt Kassorla – Design, Usability, Narrative

Player Experience Goals

1. Players will feel protective as they navigate a toxic cave environment with their mother on their back.

2. Players will feel the strength of a child-parent bond, as they make in-game sacrifices for their kin.

DESIGN PROCESS 1

Our team began with a paper prototype to test our player experience goal. I led initial design meetings to create our core loop, and designed a simple narrative prototype with dialogue, player choices, resources and two endings.

The artist, narrative team, and I collaborated to print and test this prototype, and usability collected data.

Design Process 2

Created 140+ unique Twine Passages
Wrote 350+ original lines of dialogue
Designed a network of branching paths that lead to different endings
Created a cast of 5 characters (including the player character)

Programming

Coded a ‘suspicion’ mechanic in twine script that determines NPC suspicion as a result of player responses.
Used twine macros to create a skippable typewriter effect for character text, add audio to the passages and implement gated dialogue options.
Coded and tested a system of booleans in twine script to track player choices and gameplay events to determine conditional endings.
Used CSS to create a text animation for the Title Screen and Credits Screen.
Used CSS to create separate passage fonts and text colors for the various characters.