It’s a smartphone videogame meant to teach empathy to its users. I developed the project with four schoolmates for the CampBus 2020 edition, which featured the “Empathy” theme.
Goal
The aim is to build a mobile application which tackles a specific topic related to empathy. It should provide an enjoyable experience while teaching the user something useful.
Resources
I had to lead the technical effort of the team, as I was the member with the most experience in game development. I had to pick a game engine supporting Android and iOS that I could quickly introduce to my peers. I chose Godot because of my prior experience and its Python-like scripting language.
Timeline
The project consisted of two phases:
- Design phase
- Development phase
Design phase
The phase lasted a week, where we would meet on the branded (and iconic) bus to decide what to build. We voted for the videogame idea, which consisted of a collection of empathy-related minigames. We spent the remaining time designing a single minigame to present to the jury.
The minigame consists of the player sitting at a table with five other NPCs. The objective was to pay attention to those NPCs while they were speaking by tilting the smartphone. They would get happier as you paid attention to them, resulting in you winning the game.
Development phase
The phase lasted a month when we would regularly meet and submit contributions to the project.
We were five programmers, and we knew that developing a video game requires skills other than programming. For this reason, we split the works as follows:
- Art production (1 person)
- Audio assets and partnership scouting (1 person)
- User interface production (2 people)
- Gameplay production (myself)
Result
We built the mobile game together and submitted the product on time. We assessed that the app was adapting nicely to different screen aspect ratios and was running smoothly on Android and iOS.
We built a relationship with the volunteer organization Amici della Mente, which helped us shape the minigame. They also certified that the application had a positive impact on teaching empathy.
Conclusion
The idea and its execution won us the first place of the competition. We furthermore built robust organizational techniques by adopting the Agile framework.