Raise the alarm

​​

• Engine used: Unity

• Year of production: 2018

• Role played: Lead designer & Programmer

• Duration: 2 month

• Group Project

• Genre: Crowd simulation/Serious game

​

Intention:

We had to develop a serious game on the topic of littering so I came up with the concept of teaching the player how to spread a message to a crowd using different mediums of marketing (Word of mouth, Speech, Posters, Social Media etc. ).  A crowd based simulation game wherein the player has to use these different mediums to spread the message of stopping littering, this game helps the player understand what method is effective to what target group. Social Media maybe more effective towards young people but not for elders whereas newspaper for elders and not for kids.

​

Proper research was carried out in terms of understanding the statistics of these mediums. For example, 'x' % of newspaper readers are only affected by the newspaper not everyone who reads them. The concept of a topic degrading out of peoples mind has also been implemented as they tend to forget about things overtime if not refreshed over time.

​

Achievables:

Being the lead programmer as well, implementation of this concept was quite fun. Designing character classes and making editor based scripts for the designers to assign tasks to these crowd characters in the city was a fun task. Every character had their own daily schedule along with timings. Kids would go to the school at 7 in the morning (perfect time to give a speech in school), whereas the elders would go to the park for a walk at 5 or 6 in the morning and so on. Level of awareness for each character is known as 'influence' level and setting up the whole network of how different methods influence different people was quite a tedious task to do. Implementation of the fact that seeing one advertisement or message repeatedly frustrates the character has also been in order to achieve a full simulation effect.

​

Learning outcomes:

Researching how to target different audiences using different methods made me understand a lot about marketing and implementing this in a game was quite fun. Implementing all this in the form of a crowd simulation serious game was even more fun as I got to create my own characters who would have their own tasks throughout the day and for everyday of the week they could have different tasks and their own AI which was quite interesting.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​