VR puzzle game
Secret agent's mission
Description
A VR game designed to help people with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD).
Player takes on the role of Agent 008 in the game. The player needs to talk to multiple company employees to get clues (voice interaction) and eventually find and steal the bomb plan files. The employees in the company have different personalities, some are friendly, some are serious, try to use the clues you have to talk to them and win their trust!
Teammates: Toni Nestorowicz, Xiaotian Ma, Roel Webb
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Game and presentation slides can be downloaded by clicking the star icon below.
Battle Journal
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Research games related to social anxiety and summarise the key points.
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Discuss the game's plot and interactions with the group's plot designer and programmer to ensure that the game is both fully plotted and realisable for making.
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Design puzzles and quests based on the plot outline, ensuring quests go from easy to difficult and are error friendly.
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Create multiple AI NPCs based on the design, including NPC persona and interaction logic.
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Use Unity to create game scenes and UI.
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Feedback
In this project, I really experienced the difference between the ideal and the reality.
We wanted to give players an immersive experience, so we used speech-interactive AI NPCs. In the beginning, we also planned to let NPCs make movements, such as handing items to players. However, during the actual production, we realised that there were a lot of issues that needed to be resolved. There were problems with the players' accents, the triggering of NPC quests, and the response of NPCs when the player was silent, etc. So while we were making the game, we kept reworking the plot and quest design under the technical limitations to make sure that the players could experience the whole storyline without any bugs. At the same time, we also set up more than one passing route, reduced the difficulty of some quests, and allowed players to play freely.
The biggest difficulty I encountered in this project would be in teamwork. The member in our group responsible for the plot design didn't have any code foundation and hadn't used a game engine before. Meanwhile the AI NPCs were new to everyone. I had to keep checking with the programmer to confirm the technical constraints, transforming them into plot and mission design constraints, and then feeding them back to the plot designer. Then converting the plot-quests to technical ones, and setting demands to the programmer. I also have to make sure that the AI NPCs respond the way we want based on the quests. To make matters worse, one of our team members suddenly quit when the project was about to enter testing, leaving a barely functioning UI. So I spent one night creating a workable UI, and thus the testing was successfully launched.
The lesson I learnt from this project is to check the technical constraints before making a complex design, and to check the progress of each team member as well. It is important to check the progress of work, not just by listening theis words, but by seeing actual results.