Introduction
This project involves a game that I played during my vacation with one of my closest friends. I can still recall the day when my friend and I bought this game and started to play it. We got attached right from the very beginning and were screaming and laughing while trying to complete the difficult levels. We ended up playing straight for five hours that first day, continuing for several weeks afterward, often staying up until morning. This game brought such excitement and joy to our summer vacation evenings that would have normally been like any other and became memorable adventures. Because of these fond memories, I thought immediately that it would be the perfect game to research type specimens for this project.
When I started this project, I first thought that finding all the type specimens in this game was not too difficult, and thus I planned to spend just one day to complete the work so that I would not drag on and stress about it. In order to make it less boring, I collaborated with the friend with whom I played this game this summer. We jumped back into the game, digging through its levels for those letters I needed. I thought this would only take a few hours and be just as fun as our original gameplay sessions. In reality, it was quite the opposite.
While some of them were extremely easy to find, others were relatively much harder. The complexity in the design of the game and the wide variety of locations within its many DLCs made this task well beyond what was expected. Adding to that complexity was that I had to find not just English alphabets but also Korean letters in the game, which made the process far more time-consuming than I initially expected. My friend and I had even planned to do other activities later in the day, but those plans had to be postponed as we spent eight straight hours searching for the type specimens.
Despite the unexpected difficulty, I found all 50 letters by thoroughly exploring diverse areas of the game, including the DLCs. It was much more exhausting than it should have been, but by the end, it was worth the exhaustion. Revisiting the game aroused all the good memories; the challenge to seek out the specimens increased my appreciation for its design and typography. This experience made me realize how much effort and creativity have gone into even the minutest details that we might have never noticed while playing regularly.
About the Author: Hyeyeon Kweon
I am a university student who is currently majoring in Computational Data Sciences (CDS). I chose this major because it was the only major available on this campus that was close to my interest. My interest in programming and coding languages started in middle school and has only continued to grow since then. I am not positive about what way I would like to go after graduation, but currently, my focus is the cosmetics industry.
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Wander Type: Overcooked 2