Father and Son

"A man on a wheelchair revisits his childhood home to find a gift from his father—a gift that carries memory, dream and love."

Game Director, Producer | Team of 7 | July, 2021

Journey Map

Environment Design

Recreated a realistic '90s-style Chinese apartment, bringing a sense of nostalgia to Chinese players.
Kept the structure simple, maintaining players' sense of direction.
Balanced simplicity in layouts with richness in environmental details, creating a content-rich as well as wheelchair-friendly environment.
Designed players' moving lines by structures and layouts.

Control Scheme

Design Goal

Maintain consistency in the interaction logic
Easy to learn and responsive
Intentional fatigue after a long time of movement
Low VR motion sickness

Solutions

Use simple hand gestures: Grab, Pull/Push
Continuous movement requires simple but frequent inputs
Require actual physical motion for the control of the wheelchair in order to reduce discrepancy between views and motions

“Wheelchair Simulator”

Players push/pull virtual wheels to change the linear and angular acceleration.

Cinematic Design

Since players have full control of their cameras in VR, it's not feasible to simply add cutscenes in VR games. We have figured out another way to design the cinematics: combining cinematics with gameplay.

Here's an example in which Xia Yu has a flashback to the day when he was bullied at school: The players will find themselves in the middle of a corridor. A bully sneers at the players and then runs away. Though the players gather all their strength to catch up with the bully, the corridor extends endlessly and the wheelchair gets slower and slower (the max velocity of the wheelchair is decreasing). As the players finally get tired and stop, the fluorescent lights above turn off one by one. The darkness, the hopelessness, and the loneliness gradually surround the players.

Experience Goal

Being curious about the unknown environment and stories throughout the exploration

Sharing the son's depression while experiencing his childhood stories

Feeling the surprise, regret, and love as the son finds his father's gift and achieves his dream

Design Goal

Fragmented narratives and environmental storytelling

Interactions and gameplays are easy to learn and players need to figure them out by themselves

Players will experience the inconvenience of being a wheelchair user

Playtest

Prototype

Location: Dorm, Hangzhou | Subject: 5 team members.

Content: A prototype that allows players to explore in a virtual indoors environment.

Result: The size of the environment is suitable. However, players could barely figure out the control scheme on their own and frequently lost control of their wheelchairs. We improved the control scheme to make it easier to learn and more responsive.

Vertical Slice

Location: Dorm, Hangzhou | Subject: 3 roommates.

Content: A 5-min slice of the game (Exploration Phase III).

Result: The vertical slice was totally playable, but the experience of the exploration was not intriguing enough to hook the players. We redesigned the narratives and enriched the exploration with more interactable objects.

Beta Version

Location: Starbucks, Hangzhou; Home, Shanghai.

Subject: 5 game developers.

Content: A "content complete" game.

Result: The feedback was positive. In addition, we found some players presented with disorientation during the exploration. We rearranged the layout and the moving lines.

Project Management

All the team members are juniors at university. Most major in Digital Media Technology. During the collaboration, we set up a continuously updated project dashboard on Trello. We also set up a SVN repository to keep all docs, codes and assets. Additionally, we had weekly meetings for syncing development progress.