Summary:

Our protagonist, Sarah is a school-going teenager living a pretty ordinary teenage high school life in middle America. Dealing with the loss of her father was hard enough when she got told she will have to start attending a new school in a week as they have to move. The game starts as Sarah get ready for the first day of the new school and the player experiences the start of that journey as her. She makes a few friends and things start to look up as she got invited to her first high school party. The nervousness starts to fade away as she consumes alcohol and starts to mingle with people but one small mistake turns into a social nightmare for her when a mishap at the party becomes a school-wide gossip the next day. The kids start bullying her by sharing and making awful memes at her expense and the anxiety becomes unbearable. The player plays through those ups and downs and experiences the visual differences in the world through Sarah's eyes as the colors lose saturation and you start seeing negative comments manifest themselves in person everywhere you look, the hate from the internet slowly merging with reality.

Process: 

• Pitching and Preproduction

This phase involved each designer and artist in the team pitching their idea on which type of cybercrime we should choose and the potential types of gameplay possible for each of them. The concept with the most votes was chosen and as discussed earlier the Designer responsible for the story would be the Writer and Director of the project to maintain their vision. 

• Prototyping

While the Designer responsible for the story was expanding on the game's idea and vision the other designers were assigned roles and responsibilities. Each designer was assigned a game mechanic/feature they had implemented before and was tasked with learning how to script it. The main programmer made the base game and necessary systems to tie everything together while occasionally helping the other designers with their tasks and checking progress.

• Production

The Final phase of the project was to execute the vision now that the systems and mechanics were all prototypes and the whole game's story and design pillars were established. Each designer had a story segment assigned to them and they had to execute it in the game engine using all the systems, story scripts and placeholder art prepared in the previous phase. The artists were working on the final art as the scenes get prepared by the designer for quick replacements as soon as the final art is ready.

• Jury

The project was presented to the jury along with the final project proposal and was followed by a live demo of the game and a playtest session the following evening by all the jury members.

Take Aways: 

• Unity 3D rapid prototyping experience

• Technical Level Design experience

• Serious Game design experience

• Interactive Story design experience