Overview of the project

Blindspot is an Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) project in partnership with the Data-Driven Diversity Lab (D3) at Carnegie Mellon University. D3 uses data and insights from psychology and behavioral economics to understand how different groups experience student success, thriving, and a sense of belonging at Carnegie Mellon University. Using D3’s insights, our team is creating an interactive transformational experience that aims to raise awareness and inspire action to counteract the negative impact of stereotypes and microaggressions that emerge in everyday contexts.

The deliverable is a 2D web-based game that tells a story of a Chinese girl who just arrived at CMU and experiences microaggressions in her college life. The experience consists of a prologue that gives background information of the protagonist, three chapters that happen in different places, and an ending that summarizes the story. The experience unfolds a story where the protagonist is hesitant at the beginning but becomes stronger and stays true to who she is in the end.

Deliverables

• The final build along with source code
• Documentation about hotkeys, dialogue JSON, and logger  

The client needs the build to host the game on AWS. The documentation includes the necessary information about administrative hotkeys, how to change the dialogue, and the use of the logger.

The Team

We are a team of five: 

• Producing – Shelley Xiao 
• Design/Artist – Jamie Cui
• Artist – Haiyun Wu
• Writer – Yuanqin Fan
• Programming – Michael Lu 

Our faculty instructors are Shirley and Mike. Our client is D3 Lab. 

What went well

From the producing perspective

I appreciate that we were able to choose the topic by ourselves. Because we had a lot to say about microaggressions towards international students, we were able to keep designing and developing an experience that’s authentic and creative. We benefited from the initial brainstorming process as a lot of final ideas come from our early discussion. Also, Geoff is a very responsive and kind client. He provided insight feedback throughout the semester that ensured the project was hitting our goals. Lastly, the team members were talented and responsible for their work. It was a pleasure working with them. 

From the design perspective

From the design perspective, we had a good start when we gathered our brainstorming ideas and pitched them to our client. After collecting the feedback from our client, we quickly decided to combine the two ideas we pitched into one and this combined idea became what we kept following in the development process. Based on the playtest results, our interactive experience, which involves both storytelling and puzzle solving, has been understood and appreciated by most of our playtesters.

From the story perspective

Thanks to the project requirement from our clients, I got a chance to put our real-world experience in the storytelling part of this game. Furthermore, as a group of Asian international students, we appreciate friends and faculty members around us to help us get through the racial stereotyping or implicit bias in our campus life. So I am very excited to create a narrative-based interactive experience for all international students. And everything goes very well, which is not only because I am writing stories based on our experience but also I got a lot of help from native peers and instructors. 

From the art perspective

We did a great job in combining the game scene art style and the flashback art style, which is proved to be efficient by our players many times. Gaining support from our client and instructors, we tried using pixel art style in our game scene and using sketchy art style in the flashback, and connected them with identical visual hints, like dressing the same character in the same clothes and etc. It’s also a pleasure to create such cute scenes and puzzles in this art style. Our client is always supportive to our art works, which I appreciate a lot.

From the programming perspective

From a programmer’s perspective, it was efficient and debug-friendly to split the whole functionality into several minor modules at the very beginning. For instance, in the overall hierarchy we have the dialogue system, the pathfinding (player controller) system and game logic scripts. It took a while to set up these base modules, but once it was done things started to go smoothly as most of them were shared in every chapter.

What could have been better

From the producing perspective

We might have benefited from more rounds of playtests outside of the ETC. The current results could be biased.  I could’ve reached out more. Moreover, I should’ve kept leading the team to think about what the major merits of our game are. In that way, we’ll put more effort in maximizing the merits rather than getting frustrated because of some playtesting results or faculty feedback. 

From the design perspective

I think one thing that we could have improved is designing different levels of hints for puzzles and giving player hints based on the logger analysis. When first designing the puzzles, we didn’t take hints into consideration. However, through several rounds of playtests, we realized the importance of hint to puzzle engagement. We would like the puzzles to better serve the story, whose aim is on one hand to abstract the activities that happen between characters and on the other to imply the emotional feeling of our main character Meimei. Unfortunately due to the time limit, we could only implement general hints for puzzles which will show at the beginning of each puzzle or all along in order to make the puzzle not too easy or too hard to most of the players. But I think there is still room for improvement.

From the story perspective

Although I tried our best to cover as many micro-aggression that typically happened during campus life as I can, there must be some other scenario that I missed this time. So if I got more time, I will definitely do more research for racial microaggression and put more possible scenarios in the game. Also, I could even write the whole story from the perpetrator’s perspective to make the entire story more convincing. Other than that, the sentence formation and word choice can also be improved by more revisions.

From the art perspective

We have two things to improve from the art perspective. The first is that if we could add more interactive objects in the scene, the players would have more fun. This is one of our goals at the beginning of this project. Due to the time limitation and the artworks load, we list this one to our backlog. The second thing is that some character animations could be more natural and continuous. This time is my first time to produce 2D animations, and I think next time I could be more experienced.

From the programming perspective

One thing that could be improved is the code readability. Since our artist and designer won’t be testing the game in Unity, I didn’t expose some parameters such as fading time in the editor, instead I took care of them in the scripts. This resulted in having many “magic numbers” in the code and harmed the readability. Although excuses like we need to keep the biweekly build pace could be given, it would still be better if I could add more comments or setting those numbers as constant for every build.

Lessons learned and conclusion

From the producing perspective

When the team just formed, it’s important for the producer to take initiative to lead the conversation but gradually the producer should be a good listener who makes sure everyone’s voice is heard and is able to give suggestions when needed. I learned how to effectively communicate with a client and how to fulfill the needs. Being goal oriented is also very important. Those things should be very helpful for my future career despite the fact that I won’t be a “producer.”

From the design perspective

To be honest, I don’t have any game design experience before. However, I do enjoy the designer role assigned to me and the whole designing process. As a programmer in previous projects, I might not think too much about why the interaction should be designed like this. Thus, as a designer this semester, it prompts me to think how to engage players into the experience at the same time comprehend what we want to express, which definitely would be very helpful to my future career in the game industry.

From the story perspective

Before I participate in this project, I almost know nothing about micro-aggression and don’t even know what this word means. However, after doing several rounds of research and reading some of the academic papers provided by the client, I gradually became interested in this topic, especially it’s highly relevant to us. I even learned how to be a narrative designer in a video game, but I have never done it before. During this project, I would like to say it’s not easy to be the writer of a story-based transformational game. But I really enjoy the whole process of creating this story, such as researching, writing, and proofreading. So I think Blindspot really introduced me to a brand new aspect of game designing.

From the art perspective

This is my first time being the only artist in a team, that means some pressure and responsibility. I learned how to manage the whole art style in a complete experience, and I got to know the pipeline and all the art assets required in the game. I’d thank my teammates, they are always supportive and could give me feedback from their perspective. In addition, from the professional skills perspective, this is my first try on pixel art style, which is a bit different from making other 2D art assets. This is also my first time drawing character illustrations. It’s actually a challenge to make all the art assets in 2D, but it’s fun at the same time. I think it’s a good practice for me to be a good 2D artist!

From the programming perspective

Overall I think I have learned a lot throughout this project. It was the first time for me to build a webgl game using Unity so I got the opportunity to explore some features I have never used before (as well as some unexpected bugs that only exist in webgl for sure). It was also the first time for me to use github as the version control tool over a Unity project, and I think I would only use it again if only one team member will be editing the scene files, as merging conflicts on those files seem to be impossible. Moreover I learned how to organize the code hierarchy and the proper way of writing readme through the code review with Mike and Bryan, which would be helpful not only for this project work, but also for my future career.