UCSC Wildfire Games Research Lab
Team Lead, Narrative Design, Level Design, Prototyper, Scripter
As a part of Ph.D. Student and research supervisor, MJ Johns’, undergraduate wildfire game lab, helped develop 'Early Warning', a branching narrative, 2D, RPG, designed to educate the public on wildfire safety, evacuation protocols, and home defense. The undergraduate wildfire games lab is operated under Professor Katherine Isbister as a part of the NSF grant between UCSC, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley which researches methods for games to serve as learning tools around public wildfire safety. Our team was tasked with delivering an MVP for future teams to build off of.
As team lead I helped facilitate cross-discipline discussions between artists and developers to ensure team cohesion. Research-wise, I interviewed stakeholders(in this case former Utah hotshot firefighters and land conservancy personnel) to ensure aligned project and player learning goals in relation to wildfire evacuation safety protocols. Off of the original abstract concept, ideated and wrote a full narrative, developing it into a branching narrative prototype in Twine. Within the Twine demo, I looked to experiment with our core gameplay loop of having a set amount of time to complete evacuation-related tasks(or distractions) and leaving it to the player to determine what actions were most vital to ensure a quick evacuation. After multiple rounds of iterative changes based on Stakeholder feedback, I trimmed the dialogue, restructured the decision tree, and then worked with our programming lead to implement the decision tree into the Unity system our team built and further polished our final project’s UI.
I am credited as a co-author on MJ’s CHI research paper publication.
Learning Outcomes:
Experience leading and organizing the development lifecycle of an experience’s MVP
Technical Proficiency in Rapid Narrative
Prototyping
Advancement in systems-based Unity
Scripting
Research experience around serious games as a methodology
