Be Prepared

Assignment: Create a product that connects with the goals of an existing
advertising campaign that creates awareness for a public issue.

Role: Mechanics Designer, Gameplay tester, Gameplay Programmer

Engine/Tools Used: Unity, Adobe XD, Git

Team Size: 6

Development Time: 3 weeks

Overview

Be Prepared is an educational VR experience where you hastily prepare your house for an oncoming wildfire. In a playthrough you go through the experience twice, the first time unprepared without a to-do-list or any idea of what would help your situation, and the second time with a handy checklist that will help you on your way.

After noticing that users do significantly better the second playthrough, they are taught the importance of preparing for emergencies even if they aren’t expecting them.

I was responsible for doing extensive user and campaign research, level design, quest design, and audio design and programming. I also helped the engineers by programming the quest log and fixing bugs.

Design goals

  • Create an experience that teaches users the importance of preparing for natural disasters.

  • Learn how the production of VR experiences differs from that of regular games.

  • Improve my understanding of Unity’s audio system.

  • Learn the differences between working for an organisation, and working without one.

Personal contributions

  • Paper Prototyped and tested the game’s mechanics and concept.

  • Researched the campaign, its goals, and its audience.

  • Implemented audio with audio occlusion.

  • Conducted three test rounds, each consisting of five testers.

  • Assisted engineers in bug fixing and programming.

  • Edited and filmed a video promoting the campaign.

Process

After brainstorming multiple projects, we finally settled on one and started by researching more about the campaign we wanted to make a game for. As an additional challenge we decided we would make our game in VR to truly immerse the user.
At first we had trouble concepting a paper prototype for a VR game, but after we realised we could use 3D space to our advantage we were good to go. We transformed a classroom into the floor plan of a house, labelling chairs and tables as different appliances and furniture.
The prototype was a big success. The most important finding was that users would have to play the game twice (once without and once with a to-do-list) in order to realize the impact of a to-do list.

When our engineers had created a very minimal graybox to test VR we started discovering even more challenges. The audio and visuals needed a lot of attention to prevent breaking immersion.
While we still had time I decided to research audio occlusion and how to implement it into Unity. I found a helpful script which I was able to tweak and I managed to make sounds more muffled when obstructed by objects. I used Unity’s audio systems because I was already familiar with them, but did somewhat regret not picking up FMOD or Steam Audio to help me out. Hopefully I will be able to use those in the future.

The audio occlusion and realistic 3D models paid off, test participants noted the realism of the place.

During the last week the engineers were somewhat behind on implementing the many features the game still needed. I managed to take over some tasks, finding very simple solutions and programming them myself.

When we finished the main level we decided to add a level select to prevent people from just being shoved into the level.

Finally, we were able to log our test results and prepare for the pitch!

Outcome

Creating an experience in VR is something that I am still incredibly proud of, and it has paid off immensely. We were able to produce a product that does its job and is fun to use too. I learned a lot about VR, audio, and programming in general.

We would have loved to make more levels including preparing for an earthquake or a flood, but considering we only had 3 weeks, we were happy we spent that time fully fleshing out one level rather than hastily scraping together another two.

This was a great way to start off year 2!

Credits

3D Artist

2D Artist

VR Engineer

Gameplay Engineer

Narrative Designer