How Consume Me Turned a Teen’s Checklists, Cheesecake and Yearbooks Into an Award‑Winning Game

Consume Me is a slice-of-life indie game that adapts parts of co-creator Jenny Jiao Hsia’s teenage years, and it won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at this year’s Independent Games Festival. Ahead of the game’s release, Hsia and longtime collaborator AP Thomson showed the real places and objects that inspired the game, and they discussed how they turned private memories into a playable autobiography.

1. Game and award
2. Real-world sources: apartment and boxes
3. Lists, UI and game design
4. Development, influences and minigames
5. Ending, truthfulness and journaling

Game and award

Consume Me is a 2D slice-of-life indie game that adapts parts of Jenny Jiao Hsia’s teenage experience, including struggles with diet culture. The game won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at this year’s Independent Games Festival.

Real-world sources: apartment and boxes

Hsia invited AP Thomson and background artist Jie En Lee to visit the New York City apartment where she grew up. The team compared the physical space to the game’s living room and bedroom, noting similarities in color choices and clutter. Hsia brought out boxes of personal items that informed the game’s visuals and objects, including a high school yearbook and old notebooks.

In the living room, the group found a yellowing Nintendo Wii and fitness games, which match the era depicted in Consume Me. Hsia also showed a beat-up yearbook and a list of high-school superlatives, including one that read “Most likely to change the food industry.”

Lists, UI and game design

Hsia kept boxes of notebooks and checklists from her teenage years. Those checklists resemble the game’s task UI, where the fictional Jenny’s life is organized into goals to check off. Thomson described how Hsia showed him these real lists during the game’s proposal phase: “Jenny was showing me a lot of this stuff when she was first proposing the idea for Consume Me,” Thomson says. “And she’s like, ‘Look at all these checklists and things like this. Doesn’t this just look like a video game?’ And I was like (sarcastically), ‘Yes, that looks so much like a video game.’”

Later, Thomson learned that Hsia rarely checked items off in real life. Hsia laughed and said, “Yeah, I just love making lists!”

Development, influences and minigames

Hsia originally planned to study medicine but switched to game design. She met Thomson in a Design 101 course. While prototyping, she created weekly microgames in a class taught by Bennett Foddy. Foddy called these projects “self-portrait games.”

Hsia cited Anna Anthropy, Nina Freeman, and Lucas Pope as inspirations, and specifically named Papers, Please as a game that changed her thinking about what games can do. Over time, the project expanded from a focus on dieting to a broader portrayal of being 16, including pressures to look attractive and get into college.

Ending, truthfulness and journaling

The team discussed how to end a game based on an ongoing life. Thomson said they avoided a tidy moral resolution: “We really didn’t want the ending to feel pat, like it was just sort of resolving everything magically,” Thomson says. “Jenny has some kind of revelation. It’s like, ah, yes, these toxic cultural pressures have led me astray! Time for me to reform my ways and live a happier life or whatever! That’s just not how it works in real life …. to tell a real story, there is a certain amount of messiness.”

Hsia described her journaling practice and how it evolved. She uses a Hobonichi journal where each day gets its own page, and she said she changed how she journaled once she stopped writing for an imagined audience. She said, “As you do that, you’re not honest with yourself. You’re almost journaling because you think that someone else is going to see it someday. What’s the point of that? And I think it took me a while to start being honest, and I think that also involved just not showing it to anyone.”