special weapons division
Solo project:
Skills
UX Design
Narrative Design
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Engine
Unity
Platform
PC
Project Duration
Jan 2021 - Dec 2021
Special Weapons Division is a 3D simulation game in which the player is tasked with combat training for a military AI prototype. The morality of this is put into question as the AI learns to think for itself and question the actions they’re being told to take.
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Design Highlights
creating a lovable robot
One of my main goals for this project was making players care for the AI they’re tasked to train. I gave the AI a short and cute name (MiLA) and assigned her a gender to make her more relatable to players. When writing her dialogue, I tried to incorporate a mix of “robot speech” in the text itself and human-like elements in her curious nature. I had planned to add little features to make her seem more “human” when left idle for a while, such as making her hum tunes and randomly changing her visor color. I didn’t have enough time to add those and had to devote my time to more essential features instead.
smooth and Responsive Controls
Since controlling MiLA is the core of the game, I spent a lot of time making sure navigating her around the building is not only easy, but engaging. All controls for MiLA are mapped to the mouse buttons and the E key to avoid any unnecessary complexity. All of her actions have a corresponding sound effect. If an action can’t be performed, a different sound effect is played to let the player know.
Player Choice and Dialogue
Keeping in mind the limited scope of a two semester project, I wanted the player to have choices that have a meaningful impact on the game. I decided on a system that mimics many visual novels: giving the player a few choices that each correspond to a game ending and tracking those behind the scenes. This worked well, as testers were never surprised with the result that came from their choices.