Quest 18
Building Serious Games
Description
No lectures, straight to work. The whole course is a one-semester game design and creation process. Of course, there were twice-weekly meetings and countless revisions of design documents and papers.
Teammates: Toni Nestorowicz, Xiaotian Ma, Roel Webb
Rewards
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Teamwork & Collaboration Level +2
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New skills added: VR game creation (Unity), AI NPC use and design (in world.ai)
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Create the game ‘Secret Agent's Mission’. It is a novel VR instrument designed to assess symptoms of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and simultaneously practice social behaviours.
Paper: Virtual Reality Assessment of Social Anxiety Disorder: The Role of the Serious Game ’Secret Agent’s Mission’ in Measuring Avoidance Behaviours
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Game
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Feedback
A tough challenge.
We were ambitious to combine AI and gaming to produce an immersive VR experience for SAD patients. But the idea was brilliant, the reality was serious. How to make sure the AI NPCs responded correctly to the player's answers, how to correctly identify the player's voice, how to confirm which NPC the player was talking to, etc. A whole host of issues prevented the design from being realised. We could only reach the design as best we could while looking for ways to compromise. After all, it's better to lack one or two functions than to have a buggy game.
Only by actually experiencing it do we realise how important it is to find a balance between game design, technology and research.