Friendship Lab

IN PROGRESS

A Visual Novel style game to teach children to socialize.

During this project, I was in charge of the dialogue systems as well as working with the general systems developer on the team. For this project I wrote a custom dialogue system that utilizes a custom dialogue map system that was created for this project by me. This dialogue system will spawn in dialogue boxes with icons and nametags for each speaking character and then proceed to write out their dialogue. When it reaches a choice it will dynamically spawn and space out the required number of choices. Alongside that I created a language system that will choose the correct script for the language that you have chosen. And lastly, given that this is a game for children, I created a hint system that allows the player to receive hints when there are specific actions that they need to take to continue the scene.

Other than that, I was in charge of actually putting together and finishing the scenes. The demos of the finished scenes can be found at this link.

As for tools used in this project, the game was made in Unity utilizing Github for a private Repo. The different development teams communicated via Slack, and any project updates were made through Trello to ensure that both teams were kept up to date on any changes and progress made.

This project is a text based game adapting "choose your own adventure" stories used in the Friendship Lab program (website can be found here). We were hired by Dr. Cynthia Waugh, the head of the program, to create the game to be used with children with issues that affect social skills. In the game you progress through a series of "scenes" that test your ability to perform different social interactions. In the beginning you will be given a quiz on your understanding of these social cues and then you will proceed through the scene with the different characters reacting based on your choices. At the end, you will be given a new quiz that is meant to show your social growth.

The goal of the game is to complete the quizzes and scenes with better scores, and as you do so, you will be able to access a sort of "Party Room" that includes the characters from scenes you completed as well as different party objects that will improve as you get progressively better scores.