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, 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. 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!
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.
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.
An Extended Reality Experience designed for the SCUP conference at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, March 16, 2020.
For this project I started off with project intake. This consisted of understanding the clients needs and assisting scoping this into a feasible project with the main outsourced development team. Originally we set out to work as support for a different development team. I coordinated with our two dev teams as well as our department heads and main stakeholder. Midway through development, the original development team was no longer available to work on this project. Afterwards, my team and I set out to rescope the game with our own vision and timeline. I mainly focused on support for our main developer, pitched ideas for game design and flow. Meanwhile I acted as the voice of the team to our stakeholder. During the tight timeline of this project, there were requests to change the scope of the project so I focused on client management. I acted as a shield for our development team so that they were able to work in peace and focus on their craft while I mitigated potential issues with client and other art teams. I also aided in creating the AR recognized images as well as working on the messaging for the website. I also worked on QA for this project as well as testing. Towards the end of the project, I also helped market this out to the grander Rutgers Community.
Unfortunately with Covid-19, the expected launch for this event-based game was disrupted. We have since converted this to a game where attendees could download the cards and play from home.