Project Summary: Help the students on their quest for wellness.
This is an orientation game designed for students to become familiar with campus locations, activities and resources. The main request was so that any incoming student could understand the services available to them.
In Collaboration With:Rutgers University-Newark Health & Wellness Unit, Division of Student Affairs
This was one of my favorite projects to work on. Not only did I manage client communication, I also did the following : sound design, wrote scripts for the characters, voice acted and directed our voice actors, edited the recordings, came up with story dialogue with our lead designer, pitched the dating simulation mechanic, came up with the dating sim stats, QA, testing, and minor game adjustments. I have also annually worked on updates for this game since information and services change. I have taken care of billing and have stayed as a point of contact for any support for our wonderful clients.
My involvement from the beginning was setting up the Statement of Work with our stakeholders. Once the project was scoped out, and our design document was created, we started on development. I make sure the scoping document is created by either doing it myself or working collaboratively with my teammates. While our lead game designer went to work creating the art assets, we bounced around ideas on how to make this game feel more personal. I pitched an idea of adding dating sim stats to the students to make them more fun and more real. The idea stuck and our clients loved the idea. I worked out the different fields for each character, and worked on what they could say to make them feel relatable. if you scroll down, you can see a smart young lady, majoring in Neuroscience, talking about not being able to afford food because of needing to buy textbooks. I have had that exact thing happen in college, especially as I continued on to higher lever courses which required new textbooks. I hope that making a relatable character would stick in the minds of the students playing. If they find someone in a similar situation, hopefully they would remember this game and remember the food pantry! We made sure to come up with relatable stories for each of the characters and making sure we aligned with what the clients wanted as well.
The voice lines and voice acting came as a late addition since we were pulling ahead of schedule and we had the time to add more features to this game. I found it quite enjoyable writing out scripts for the characters and finding people to voice them. Editing and fine tuning audio was new and challenging but I felt significantly cooler after taking this part of the project on. I also found great joy in working with our lovely voice actors and directing their motivation and background for each line. I think it made a difference in the final audio. I also searched for
All the small touches, and feature additions to this project made this super fun and collaborative. I loved directing voice actors, coming up with scripts and having the creative freedom to come up with light hearted additions to the game. The most rewarding aspect of this project is the feedback we got from students who played the game. I believe we got over 2,000 plays and with our feedback survey, we were able to see students’ comments.
