The Game
Speak Your Mind is a game about the struggles of social anxiety and overcoming these struggles. The game features many exciting minigames to allow you to either speak your mind or go with what everyone else wants. The game was released on Itch.io to positive reviews.
My Responsibilities
Level Design
A priority in a game taking the player through different scenarios involved a heavy focus on level design. This included using the tools provided in Unity such as various types of lighting and models as well as our created 3D models to design different explorable areas from a long apartment hallway to an everyday office space.
3D Asset Creation
Another major responsibility involving designing levels was through asset creation. Using Maya, I created various assets for each area, such as a large taxi for the player to sit in, an office set up including computers, tables, and chairs, and even break room equipment such as a fridge. This was soon followed by exporting them into Unity for level placement and making changes when necessary.
Narrative Design
Another part of this game was its narrative driven quests and multilinear storyline. This involved writing drafts of dialogue and working together to craft a story of scenarios to teach players confidence and the ability to make their own choices.
Challenges
The issue of making a game like this, especially as the team were all students at the time was figuring out how to program multiple endings. A simple story is just that, simple, but to properly teach others to speak their minds like how we desired, we needed a more complex system than that. We did take our time to get each ending as effectively as possible, though while complicated at first, we could not manage to initially get each pathway out as intended. However, after much programming and hours of no sleep and working, we managed to make our game into a simple yet powerful tale of speaking your mind with multiple endings to ensure the message is clear and visible.
Writing Samples
Below are two samples of written work during the process of making this game, such as the planning of several pathways to reflect minigames as well as just overall dialogue. Please feel free to take a look on the clickable links below.
These are lines of dialogue written for the game's gold build, reflecting each quest as well as the pathways that they lead to, with a point system reflecting next to the minigame title, with -1 leading against speaking your mind and +1 leading toward it.
This is a document showcasing the ideas for how our pathways would work, showcasing whether the player would speak their mind or not based on a point system, +1 leading toward it, and -1 leading against it.