Serious game design: Desktop gaming
The Journey
Project Goal:
To create an applied game for teaching about upcoming technologies to employees as its primary objective. One of them being IoT. Incorporating roleplaying and science fiction as the theme of the game, thus reaching out to the younger lot of the workforce. The person would gain theoretical knowledge throughout the gameplay with simple activities to engage in as well, thus enabling them to take their first step into up-skilling.
Medium: desktops with webGL compatible browsers.
Customer & End User
Company employees on a learning curve.
Game's plot
Setup in a distant future, it is about an anthropologist who travels back a year ago in time. Visiting an alien planet, to discover nuggets of knowledge in the field of IoT, hidden in a museum which miraculously survived a cosmic cataclysm. The civilisation on this planet doesn’t exist anymore but by discovering these nuggets and learning about the historical development of their digital knowledge, our anthropologist will be able to complete the missing pieces of a puzzle which exists in his time and reveal a bigger picture.
Methodology - Creation
Spanned across three months with a team of 13 people, we started off with the initial assessment of the concept. The overall game was divided in three half: GAMEPLAY (discovering objects), ACTIVITY (assembling objects) and a final QUIZ.
Extrinsic motivation elements included:
A health bar which would start reducing as the gameplay begun.
Varied points allotted at discovering different IoT objects.
Bonus points for discovering nuggets.
Next we worked upon ideating the environment of the museum, the 3D content which would go inside, lighting application, color scheme and the planet’s terrain. Picking up references from sci-fi movies, concept arts and creating a vision board. Head-up display elements including health bar, game panels, thumbnail representation for collectibles and various others were created.
The gameplay was in first person therefore no character creation was required. To accompany the protagonist, we introduced a voice which would act like it’s virtual assistant. Ushering them into the game.
Individual contribution:
UX and visual design, Concept for the finale quiz was also created,
VFX referencing for the 3D models.
Success metrics
First of its kind in the field of upskilling. Positive feedback from the roll-out and to be scaled up into more immersive experiences i.e Virtual Reality.
Team:
Priyanka Bhadauria, Harshita mandal, Vinod Khandelwal, Pranav Buradkar, Gopal Shankar, Sameer Clement, Varsha Sreekumar.
Tools used:
Jira : Task management
Excel : detailed timelines, budget allocations, and resource planning.
Other tools used: Miro, Adobe Illustrator, sketch
Inspiration board
Our keywords were post apocalypse, civilisation, sci-fi. Environment design was of prime importance to set the scene. Blizzards and snow covered terrain for the planet's environment. And a deranged, abandoned hi-tech facility environment for where the actual gameplay would take place was what came out of the inspiration board.
Journey map
The inspiration board played a significant part in shaping the journey and storyline at later stages. Here is an early outline of what was the set expectation. A story where our player, disguised as an collector from future travels a century back in time to uncover lost pieces of knowledge and learning about all the technological advancements that the civilisations of that time made (insert present day technologies). Taking them away to complete a significant puzzle about human history which in his time, is missing.
Storyboarding
The storyboarding was one of the major stepping stones which took the most weeks to make the story come together. Here the team along with the client, discussed the logic aspect and created diversions, assigned controls and created the main features which would decide the end result. We visited the journey from this point numerous times. Below displayed are a few scenes which were created.
UI Design
The below presented screens are only a fraction of the mammoth number of UI elements which were designed for various features in the game. The color scheme was kept in contrast to the environment which was designed, the background used in these pictures is changed due to proprietary limitations.
Title screen design
The animation sequence for the game's title and the screen was created by me which was then further integrated by the development team. Name of the game has been changed due to proprietary limitations.
