This article was originally published on September 19, 2025 - read the full issue here

By Marie Dealessandri

After just shy of ten years in development, Consume Me is finally releasing next week. What started as a minigame collection for Jenny Jiao Hsia's undergrad project evolved to become the winner of the prestigious Seumas McNally Grand Prize 2025.

Consume Me tackles coming-of-age themes of love, disordered eating and high parental expectations, told through colourful and hilariously dark vignettes. We talk to Hsia and co-creator AP Thomson about finally getting this very personal project to the finish line.

The power of UI and finding the right co-devs

"I just never gave up on it," Hsia tells us about the project. "But the game truly became the version it is today when AP joined and we had the possibility of funding."

The team landed funding through Kowloon Nights in 2019 and went full-time on the project soon after the pandemic hit.

Hsia says she really wanted Consume Me to have an overarching structure that'd ties together the minigames she made and the story she wanted to tell, but found it challenging. Thomson explains: "The games needed a common language that they used to communicate with each other, which ended up becoming the stats, the resources [and the] common UI."

Hsia highlights the need for solo developers working on passion projects to find the right partners, to help them get to the finish line.

"[AP] could see the bigger picture whereas I enjoyed focusing on the details. I didn't know how to make the overarching structure for Consume Me. Part of indie development is also wanting to feel good making [the game], and what felt good was making minigames. To make a whole entire game, you have to either learn how to do stuff that you're really bad at or give that stuff away to people who are better at doing it than you are."

Making the player complicit in telling a true story

In Consume Me, the player is initially tricked into disordered eating before consequences are revealed further down the line. We ask the duo how they managed it without it feeling unfair.

"Maybe the answer to that is giving the player the context of balance; a whole bunch of other stuff on their plate," Hsia says. "It's not a game that is purely about dieting – you also have to please your mom, do your homework and, with all of that, it also gets the player to take on bad-behaviour dieting."

Thomson jumps in: "All videogames are tricking the player, fundamentally. They're presenting you with a model of the world that is fundamentally fake and you don't question that fact."

He continues: "The thing we slowly pieced together with Consume Me is building a model of Jenny's mental state as a teenager, putting the motivations in there that led her to behave, ultimately, the way that she did. We wanted to give the player mechanical and systemic incentives to play the game a certain way, and if they play the game a certain way, then they successfully are playing as Jenny. They're representing Jenny's mindset and the choices that she is making. The big difference between Consume Me and a more traditional videogame is Consume Me does have places where the curtain is drawn back a little bit, and it's like, 'Wait, this model was fake to begin with'.

"When you run up against that, that's when you get problems in reality. People are operating under these models that are not entirely true. Their understanding of the world is incomplete, or based on misinformation. And that's part of telling a true story – engaging with the fact that the systems you think guide your life are not always telling you the truth about what's happening."

Getting to the finish line

When asked for advice for developers struggling to finish a long-term project, Thomson acknowledges that the conditions in which they were able to develop Consume Me may be impossible to replicate in today's market.

"The funding situation is very different from what it was when we were getting funding," Thomson says. "But in terms of working on long projects: get used to doing the same thing every day. Focus less on 'What am I getting done?' and more on 'Am I putting in a consistent amount of time every day?' On Consume Me I would spend 20 to 40 minutes writing dialogue every single day. I did that for a couple of years. It requires a very different style of work than if you're used to much shorter projects. It becomes more about endurance. But if you can make it, it'll be rewarding. The key to getting through it is finding pleasure in the moment to moment."

Hsia emphasises again the need to find co-devs that complement your weaknesses to be able to fully deliver on your vision.

"Making an entire videogame is really challenging. To those [solo] indie game developers: acknowledge that there are people better than you at doing something that you might want to do. And maybe to finish this game, you've got to hire them and work together as a team to make this thing. That's what I wish I knew. And it took so long to make this project because I was so resistant about that."

The duo aren't talking about their next project yet except to say: "It's not gonna be a ten-year long process."

This article was originally published on September 19, 2025 - read the full issue here