Life Is Pain tasks the player with talking to a cast of strange characters and using a selection of topics, along with joke cards drawn from a customizable deck, to tell jokes and improve their mood. In doing so, the player learns more about each character and puzzles out each one's specific tastes in comedy, allowing them to better tailor jokes to them and eventually max out their mood. By raising characters' spirits, the player can help them deal with the dismal state of the world in a healthier way.

The goal of this project was to create a mechanically rich, engaging dialogue system that encourages cooperative, win-win interactions while providing a challenge to the player. Joke-telling was chosen due to being a less common mechanic in games and to break away from zero-sum actions like haggling and argumentation, and the system was built from the ground up based on deck-builder mechanics to accomodate this, having characters comment on jokes dynamically rather than based on a set dialogue tree. The game's dialogue system was initially tested as a paper prototype, which was then implemented in Godot and further expanded into the final game via multiple rounds of playtesting.