Ennui (A Serious Game)

May 26th 2022

Ennui (Noun): a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.

For my final semester at MSU I was assigned the position of Creative Director for a Serious Game. I was originally going to create this concept on my own but after talking with my professor and fellow classmates, three of them wanted to work with me due to positive experiences from past projects & classes.

Engine | Unity        Duration | Two & A Half Months        Team | Four        Roles | Creative Director, Producer

Development Process

As the creative director I worked very closely with my team, I wrote the screenplay for the game and from there discussed with each of them what task they will have. My three classmates were an Audio Engineer, Programmer and Level Designer.

I had my Audio Engineer create the ambiance, sound FX, and title theme from scratch. I was genuinely surprised by all of her work because she seemed to really understand what mood & atmosphere I was trying to convey. I also recorded voiceovers for her to edit & clean up.

For my Level Designer, I sent him pictures of every possible angle of my apartment and even the floor plan. I wrote the screenplay with my apartment in mind, and he did a great job Recreating my apartment and the specific set pieces I wanted to focus on.

And with my Programmer, due to this being a game with a narrative focus the one challenging task we both worked on was a object viewer system. Similar to Resident Evil our game would allow the player to interact and view specific objects by rotating them around and find secret compartments/notes that could be revealed by inspecting it.

I created a Discord channel for us and each week I held a weekly meeting to discuss what each of us would work on, what we had to turn in as a progress report as well as when and where we would meet up to record voiceovers.