Project Sephani

Project Summary

Sephani is an interactive narrative that is based on the Hades and Persephone Greek myth. Our vision was to create a narrative that evokes the emotions of a mother-daughter relationship while having different endings depending on the choices of the player. By providing choices to the player, we believe that it provides them with the power to shape Sephani’s destiny and her story with the Underworld and Hydel. At the same time, to create curiosity and surprise, we created ARGs to let players find hidden paths and endings. The choice is theirs and it is up to the player to find out where they want to take Sephani next.

Characters

Our players will be able to choose their own path and have choices in how the story plays out. We have integrated different platforms such as social media and QR online codes. The player can find different variations of the story through physical postcards scattered around a public space (i.e. Trafalgar campus).

KPIs (key performance indicators)

KPI 1: Project schedule

• Percentage of overdue/missed/completed project tasks and deadlines

• Are we working efficiently to meet deadlines for specified tasks?

• How much time are we using per task?

• Number of meetings held

KPI 2: Collaboration

• Number of meetings held

• Are we meeting deadlines effectively as a group?

• Are we solving issues together as a group?

KPI 3: Communication

• How frequently are we communicating with each other?

• Are we helping each other when there are issues?

• How frequent are team meetings to accomplish goals and objectives?

Risks and opportunities

We recognized that there were risks to doing multiple paths in a short amount of time, and the possibility of not finishing the project as high as our scope was very large. We reduced that risk by making the scope of the story smaller but adding further elements to other areas like in the digital artifacts. Development within Unity was challenging as FPS movement and the interactions were a challenge but with the tools that we had, we tried our best.

Another risk is that there was the chance that the ARG aspects of the narrative would be boring or too simple. As it is difficult to create a narrative that is interesting to everyone, it is impossible to try to make a product that would fit into everything. We saw that some ARGs, they are very difficult, while others are very simple. We believe that we provided a trail of “breadcrumbs” so that players are able to find the hidden paths and experience the “what ifs” in the story.

On the other side, we found many opportunities that could be done:

• We found opportunities of using Twine and use it as a form of dialogue and found great pathing options aside from creating them in Unity

• Using pre-recorded cutscenes using virtual face and hand tracking software and virtual avatars

• Further optimizing the web experience regarding movement and load times

• Open world ideas that we couldn’t implement

• Developing in VR instead of an FPS view

Challenges

Over the course of the project, we encountered various challenges:

• Going back to earlier stages, we were not successful in using PlayCanvas.

• Developing with Unity and its shortcomings

• Team collaboration in Unity (we found this was possible at the end of the project)

• Implementing last two digital artifacts

Conclusion

Reflections

Marlee - Given the opportunity to expand on this project, I would have liked to include the characters more. Since we were learning unity we kept it fairly simple but there’s so much you can expand on while building stuff. Ideally, we could have added the character’s images in the dialogue to add more visuals for the user. As well as I definitely would have improved the environments I did and add more detail to them. This is a big project that was done in a short amount of time and I think that with the wider scope it has the potential to become an actual full-fledge game that a user can use.

Kenzie - If we had more time to continue working on this project, I would have liked to do some more sketches and posts for the characters social media platforms to show their development. It would have been more fun for the user to see them change as they go on their journey. I would have liked to expand it more with unity by seeing it used on VR headsets and have it more developed in that sense, but due to the time crunch we were given for this project, we had to keep things simple to get what we wanted and also have time to explore our story. This was a very large project, with a lot of work that needed to be done. I believe we did a good job on creating this entire project and telling Sephanis story, while having it be exciting to the users.

Wilson - Overall, I think that the project and the final deliverable were very much a success. I was happy with how the environments turned out and the digital/physical artifact. If we had more time, I would like to refine the environments further and delve deeper into the dialogue system, and perhaps integrating Twine. I would love to explore more pathing in the narrative and perhaps even looking into ways to automate this. Learning Unity was very much a learning curve but there is so much potential. Although, some issues were Unity build specific but we managed to overcome this by the tutorials provided and a little bit of searching online. Other than that, working with my group members was a blast and I wouldn’t hesitate to work with them again. Our project management was smooth, we communicated effectively, and solved issues as a team.

Jody - This project was thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. Learning unity was very fun and having used other 3d software, I did not find it difficult to integrate into. We decided to go for a low poly look but if we were to do this project again, I’d push for realistic environments because Unity is known for producing immersive, beautiful environments. I would’ve loved for us to do more visuals and develop the characters further through visual development, however, given the size of the project, little details would have shone through. Definitely 100%, I would’ve loved it if we were able to dive deep into VR integration but definitely it was a big learning curve. All in all, everyone did a great job doing their part to make this project see completion. I feel that going through a game pipeline would’ve kept us more organized but I couldn’t have asked for a better team to work with!