Sun Wukong’s story started as something personal, my dad telling me these tales growing up since I’m half-Chinese. I built the project around identity, since Wukong’s arc from trickster to hero maps onto what a lot of AUT students go through in their early twenties. The centrepiece was a personality test tied to the four companions on the journey, built in Figma with Variables and Conditionals so each choice actually branches to a different result.

I’m not a trained watercolour artist, so I used Fotor’s AI generator to produce Chinese ink painting references, traced the outline, then painted over them by hand in Photoshop. The AI gave me a starting shape, but the brushwork and colour were mine, AI as a sketch tool, not the thing doing the painting.

Twelve weeks wasn’t much time for something this culturally loaded, and I spent over 20 hours just learning Figma’s Variables well enough to make the test work, time I’d rather have spent checking whether the results actually felt accurate to users.