Nicolas JEAN VICTOR

Game Designer

Kinefish & Grabby

November 2024 - Student Project

Brief and pitch

For this project, we had to create a VR serious game that could be used by physiotherapists to make an exercise more fun and less tedious for the patient. We had one month to realize the prototype from A to Z, with the help of some 3D students.

The exercise had to be as accurate as possible, and the game shouldn't cause any injuries caused by a wrong move. The game design was a tool to serve the medical objective, and not the contrary. Finally, the game shouldn't occasion any motion sickness, whether it be because of the framerate, the graphic quality or the design.

We decided to go for an arm exercise, and we turned it into a fishing minigame inspired by rowing machines. The main gameplay consist of a single core strength exercise, where the patient must hold a position for some time with a resistance band.

Context

Kinefish & Grabby was the first project of my second school year. We were 3 Game Design students working with 8 3D students for a month.
While all keeping some tasks related to game design, we split the work in three : one of us was the Lead Programmer, one was the Lead Game Designer, and I was the Producer.

My work on the project

My main role was being the Producer. I also designed the Signs and Feedback, some of the balancing, organized the playtest sessions and compiled the QA results.

What I learned

No matter how much you plan it, things can still go wrong. Despite setting plannings, roadmaps, timetables and a responsibility matrix, several things went wrong at different stages; a lot can happen during a production, and my work is not to plan everything, but to make sure I'll be able to find a solution when things go unpredictably wrong.
Every team has a different pace. This was my second experience being a producer on a school project, and I was surprised with how different it was, despite several team members being part of both projects. The dynamics can be really different, and there's no magic way that works everytime; I had to adapt my processes and my way of working to this new team and it made this project a very different and instructive experience.
Less is more. What helped us be succesful in this project was how deceptively simple it was. We thought about adding more features, but in the end, we kept it light and it was for the best: for the budget, for the time we had, but first and foremost for the design itself. The game works as a whole, and adding more content would have only made it more precarious.

Software I used

Unreal Engine, to ajust variables and balance the game as we went along
Excel and Sheets, to create Signs and Feedback tables
Forms, to collect playtest data
Miro, to brainstorm, but also to setup the first responsibility matrix
Communication tools like Discord and Teams, to be efficient in the way we communicated between each other, and make sure everything was clear between us and the 3D team
Oculus Quest, to test the game

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