At Game Developer’s Conference 2025, I had the opportunity to interview Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson before the Expo Floor opened to demo their upcoming title, Consume Me the morning of the Independent Games Festival Awards. Consume Me stars a high school girl named Jenny who is trying to balance all aspects of her life while also trying to manage her weight in sometimes a very unhealthy way.
During our interview, we talked about the development of Consume Me, about Ms. Hsia’s introduction to video games, how it felt about basing a game upon her personal life experiences, her enjoyment of ballet, and more!
You can follow Jenny Jiao Hsia on X and AP Thomson on X.
You can find out more about Consume Me at the official website, too.
You can also check out my hands-on demo of Consume Me here!
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Operation Rainfall: Good Morning! My name is Quentin H. with oprainfall, and could you please introduce yourself?
Jenny Jiao Hsia: My name is Jenny Jiao Hsia, and I am the co-director for Consume Me.
OR: Just briefly — what is Consume Me about?
JJH: Have you felt stupid, fat, and ugly in high school? Because that’s how I felt, and I made a video game about it! And that’s my 10-second elevator pitch.
OR: I was playing a demo for it earlier — and I noticed while playing and watching some of the trailers and previous builds online, that while you can influence Jenny – the character — with her eating habits and behaviors, you cannot control or influence her mental state. She says some fairly awful things about herself in her mirror and [in] her journal.
JJH: Yes.
OR: What that a purposeful choice in game design? Can you talk about that?
JJH: I basically looked at my journals from high school and drew inspiration from that. And, when I was in game design school, I started learning more about indie video games. And I think Papers, Please was the one game that made me go “[w]ait, I could turn my horribly traumatic experience in high school into a video game as well.”
It’s a game based on real life, and everything happened in a specific way. So, we wanted to tell this one story and therefore you have no control over her thoughts.
“I wanted things to matter, because I feel that a lot of this sort of game — if it’s trying to tell some autobiographical story, it’s very linear and we really wanted the player to feel the stress that high school Jenny felt. And that means you’ve got to lose sometimes, you know, and get good at something.”
OR: In an interview with NYU Tisch School of the Arts, you mentioned that you took on a part-time teaching job after you graduated with a game design degree. What were you teaching at the time, and what made you want to take the dive into developing Consume Me full time instead of just par time? What was that moment?
JJH: Basically, realizing that I only have so much energy and so much mental capacity to work on one thing, and if I was splitting my time up too much, I wouldn’t be able to give my all to working on this video game.
AP Thomson: Also, we got funding, so we didn’t have to [keep] a part time job!
OR: Could you introduce yourself as well, please?
APT: My name is AP Thomson, and I am the co-director on Consume Me with Jenny.
OR: What were you teaching at the time, out of curiosity?
JJH: Oh, I think at the time I taught…Intro to Game Development.
APT: Didn’t you do the 2D Animation class, as well?
JJH: Yes, I also taught 2D Animation, thank you!
OR: This isn’t the first game you’ve done that features you as the main character outside of you as the developer. I played through Chat With Me that you made for a class called Prototype Studio. In Chat With Me, you play as a person who receives a video and text call from their long-distance partner, portrayed by ‘you’ with your itch.io handle as their screen name, et cetera. You both talk about your days, things that are bothering you, and there is a possible prompt to bring up at the end about if ‘this’, presumably the long-distance relationship, is still working that neither of you really want to talk about.
Between Chat With Me and Consume Me, what makes you want to use such a clear proxy for yourself in your games? How much of these characters that the player interacts with are the real Jenny Jao Hsia versus the avatar they see on the screen?
JJH: Good question! I make it about myself because I think I’m not too good at making up fictional characters. I think I’ll end up falling into tropes if I try to write something completely from scratch. So, I think a lot of it is rooted from personal experience. And then, as for how realistic the character is versus myself in real life — because AP did such a huge part of developing this game with me, I think this character in the game is actually more ‘together,’ you know?
APT: A fusion of both of us.
JJH: Yeah, I think the character is actually accomplishing more in the video game than I did in high school.
OR: Can you talk a bit about what it was like writing the journal entries that are in Consume Me?
JJH: It was over a decade-and-a-half before I started working on this game. So, I don’t know. It was just like, stream of consciousness, you know? You feel bad that day, and then you write a bunch of stuff down. And you know if you’ve played a bit of this, ‘To Do’ lists are a big feature of this video game. Well, I did that a lot in high school. I would write down a bunch of ‘To Do’ list items. But unlike in this game, I would never check them off in real life. *laughs*
OR: You’re nominated for five awards with the Independent Games Festival: Excellence in Design, Excellence in Narrative, Excellence in Visual Art, the Nuovo Award, and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Taking up the visual aspect of Consume Me: what did you go with this hand-drawn graphical style that you did for this game? Did you ever consider or try out a different style of art?
JJH: No. Because — well, I guess when I was prototyping this game, I used this original art style. It was not as detailed, and I would say that the art style that is currently in the game — a huge part of why it did so good is because we hired Kelly — Jie En Lee — to help with a lot of the backgrounds. And with their technical ability to make the world feel more expressive, it just really brought the art to the next level. And I guess I just didn’t think too much about the art style. Just “Let’s go with it, we have money for it!”
APT: It’s evolved a lot over the years.
JJH: Yeah, yeah! I like joking that this game looks like it was made by a whole team of artists, but it’s just us not sticking to the art style.
OR: The Independent Games Festival article that revealed the nominations said something interesting: It said that Consume Me started as a collection of prototypes. Can you talk about that aspect of the development process? How did you decide to merge them all into one title?
JJH: I was struggling a lot with that. And a lot of people were telling me ‘Just release it as a minigame collection! Just get it out!’. And I don’t know, I was really stubborn about not wanting to do it because I also wanted to tell a story through these minigames.
APT: And you wanted the minigames to have stakes!
JJH: Yeah, yeah! I wanted things to matter, because I feel that a lot of this sort of game — if it’s trying to tell some autobiographical story, it’s very linear and we really wanted the player to feel the stress that high school Jenny felt. And that means you’ve got to lose sometimes, you know, and get good at something. And I guess when it all came together was when AP started to work on it full time.
APT: It was what you brought me on to do, originally, right? Let’s combine all of these together into one thing, and it’ll take a couple of months — and it was many years ago.
JJH: And prior to that, you were on the sidelines telling me that ‘You gotta make a spreadsheet prototype!’ And I was like ‘Ummmmmm, I don’t really want to do that.’
APT: And so I did it.
JJH: And then we got money, so I can pay you to do it!
OR: You mentioned on X that you have a real-life experience with the ballet world when talking about a sale on point shoes. Can you talk about your experience with ballet and dancing in general?
JJH: Yes, yes! I have so much to say! I want to give a talk about why game developers should learn ballet, and I think it has such a huge impact on me as a developer. Prior to ballet, I was never classically trained as an artist. I just jumped into video games kind of randomly, and I feel like my experience at the NYU game center really focused on expression and idea but not necessarily on execution and technique. And when I was working on this game with AP, we started prior to the pandemic. But during COVID, I moved away, and we were like an hour apart.
So, everything was Zoom, everything was remote. And I was like ‘I just can’t be looking at my screen, feeling depressed about my life.’ I wanted to go to a studio. And I feel like — God, there are so many things. Ballet is the most technical dance. It’s almost like mathematics, but for dance. And I feel like there is a lot of similarities between ballet and coding. And just thinking about, right and wrong and stuff. I feel like working on this video game and being an indie game dev — there is no one who is telling you what’s right or wrong. Like, you’re on your own. You get this money, but you have to finish making the game. As an artist, you want to make a good thing, right? But who’s there to tell you what’s good or not? So, a lot of the stress of working on this is actually figuring out ‘How do I use my time effectively, and how do I make something worth making?’.
And I actually feel like learning this completely different art form — that’s existed for centuries — and has methodology and literally teachers coming over and telling you how to correct yourself is [such] a mental relief. Because, as an artist, you’re doing that job. And sometimes, it’s nice to just turn off that side of your brain and be like ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, please tell me what I’m doing and if its right or wrong.’ And I feel like ballet really filled that aspect of still trying to make something beautiful but still getting that reassurance that ‘I’m in the right direction!’, you know?
OR: Did you do modern or classical [ballet]?
JJH: IT’S CLASSICAL! Do you know anything about ballet?
OR: I know enough that I could not hit 32 fouettes as the Black Swan.
JJH: *laughs* Yes! I cannot even do that, yet! I’m very [much a] beginner!
OR: When did you start doing ballet?
JJH: Three years ago!
OR: What made you want to start ballet three years ago?
JJH: It was scary, and I liked the clothes. I had never taken a dance class. And oh my God, I think it changed my personality too, because I remember being in class and they were telling you to go run across the floor, and you can’t NOT do it. There’s everyone waiting behind you in line. And you just feel so vulnerable and clumsy and bad, but I think everyone should have a space to be bad and stupid and fail, you know? You have to learn to laugh — because we’re just too serious. And there are a lot of things to cry about these days. But it’s nice to have a space to be like ‘This is fucking ridiculous, and I’m in pain, and I look ugly, but it’s okay! I have a whole room of people doing it with me!’
And another thing I love about ballet so much is that the people I got to be around. It’s the opposite of the people at GDC. I came to games very young, and I love that I got to have this experience — but I think, I never got to be surrounded by women. And I thought it was so awesome to get to have that, and I’ve never had that aspect of an artistic community — which is a little sad. I know there are women game developers too, but that did not happen until I started ballet.
OR: What’s your dream ballet role?
JJH: Oh my God! I don’t even think about it, because I know that I’m never going to be that. I don’t know — I learned ballet because I think it’s just so cool to like, perfect everything, but I don’t care about the stage thing. But if I had to choose? Obviously, I love Swan Lake, so Odile would be amazing. But I love Giselle so much. Those are my two favorites.
“I really like feeling productive and I love having a little ‘To Do’ list where I can check things off but working on this video game for so long — there’s a lot of tasks for designing this game where there is no checklist.”
OR: I want to touch on something you said a few moments ago. You said that you were introduced to video games at a young age. Can you talk about that?
JJH: Well, I was introduced because my dad and my little brother played video games a lot, and it drove my mom crazy. So, I kind of had a negative idea of what video games were. But when I came to NYU, I just dropped into this art history for video games course, and I was 19 and surrounded by MFAs [OR Note: Master of Fine Arts]. Everyone was significantly older than me and seemed to be much more knowledgeable. And I was always like, ‘Senpai! Tell me more about how to do stuff!’. So, I feel like that was the kind of environment I grew up in. I was always the youngest one tagging along with other people.
APT: You got accidentally placed in my recitation section, and that’s how we met.
JJH: You were the TA-
APT: I wasn’t. I was in there, I was a grad student, and you were in undergrad.
JJH: Yeah! Yeah.
OR: So, what’s next for you — both with game development and with knitting?
JJH: We actually have an idea for our next game, but we’re going to take it really slow and not make the same mistakes we made on this project. So, actually understand what the ending to the story is prior to making it. And for knitting: I just want some time to just make art without thinking about money. And like, just learn something new — I love doing that. I made this on the plane! [OR Note: She demonstrates her hand-made sweater.] I actually — so I bought this knitting machine, and it’s so cool! And you can make these panels, these tubes, and I was basically on the plane seaming them up and I did it for five hours straight. And I was like ‘Oh my God, I never have this much time!’ I just want to have time to do that.
OR: You mentioned earlier that there were mistakes in the development of Consume Me. Can you talk more about that?
JJH: Yeah, we didn’t know what we were doing! We didn’t know how to make a video game.
APT: I thought that it was funny when you were like “Next time, we’re going to take it slow and not make the same mistakes.”
JJH: I feel like that if we make no money, I would be really sad, but I would be like ‘this is such an amazing experience.’ Because I learned so much about collaborating, working with people, making something big and then not sharing your process simultaneously. Because that was really how I promoted my own work prior to this big game. I would post a lot online and then share my progress. I actually have a huge notation page that I’ve saved all my work in progress [on], and I want to share that, but I’m also — we still have some little bits to finish off with this game, and I feel like it’s really hard to switch in terms of ‘It’s time to promote!’ and then keep finishing up these tasks. So that switch was a huge thing to learn.
And also, just being like — you have to make a good thing first before talking — I feel like that. As I continued posting more about this game, and also realizing ‘Oh, I don’t even know what this game is, there’s no substance’, it felt really bad to try to convince people that this game was any good. It’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t believe in it, why should I try to lie to you and tell you its good?’.
OR: How did you find that ‘substance’?
JJH: By being quiet, and working, and suffering. And there’s nothing to post — you can’t post, well maybe you can make a really long thread, but I’m not that sort of person.
APT: Posting screenshots of the spreadsheet is a little less than exciting than animation threads.
JJH: And hours-long meetings where I’m going through my journal entries and crying. It’s like ‘Okay, we still don’t really know what Chapter Four is about.’ But it just takes a lot of time, and all that work that you put into it — even though it seems like there’s no direct impact immediately, it still has an effect on the overall design and overall outcome of the entire video game. I really like feeling productive and I love having a little ‘To Do’ list where I can check things off but working on this video game for so long — there’s a lot of tasks for designing this game where there is no checklist. You just have to sit with it. And maybe it’ll come to you. God, there are so many times where I was just like ‘What is the ending of this game?’ and no one could help me!
APT: We figured it out, eventually.
JJH: Eventually — we figured it out in storyboarding.
OR: In both Consume Me and Chat With Me, you’re very vulnerable with yourself and your emotions. How do you become comfortable with that?
JJH: It’s just my personality. I feel like I’ve always been pretty vulnerable with talking to people. Sometimes, it’s just too much oversharing. I think I make good first impressions, but I suck at following up! *laughs* I can make you feel like you know me for the first hangout, but then I’m not so good with the fifth or sixth. I think it’s a personality thing, but I do feel like that as I continue to work on this video game, it’s become less personal for me, because as we grew our team, I wanted everyone to feel like — I don’t know, it’s their game as well. I also feel like I just got desensitized from thinking about it for so many years. It’s like ‘Okay, this happened. Not going to make me cry.’
OR: So is the Jenny in Consume Me still fairly autobiographical to you?
JJH: It’s definitely — she’s a better version of me, and she’s also kind of bad in that game. So, I don’t know! *laughs* I feel like she’s a more competent version of me. But, obviously, there’s similarities there.
OR: When can we expect Consume Me to be released?
APT: We don’t have an official release date yet. We are looking toward…sometime in the summer.
OR: Any idea what platforms?
APT: Initially, it’s going to release on PC and Mac. Eventually, it will release on mobile or at least on iOS. And eventually, we’re planning some console stuff — but we don’t want to announce anything specific yet. That’s all we’ll say for that.
OR: To someone who may be interested in picking up Consume Me, do you have something to say to them?
JJH: I think if you struggle with eating disorders and body image, you may want to skip this game.
APT: The game may be upsetting a tad.
JJH: Yeah, the game may be upsetting for you. We do have a content warning in the beginning, but I guess just don’t underestimate the cute art style. I hope you laugh and cry and leave us a positive Steam review!
OR: Thank you!
Are you excited for Consume Me to come out?
Have you done ballet before?
Let us know in the comments below!
