Bullied
Bullied is a university project made with a team consisting of two engineers, four artists and two designers. This serious game aims to sensitize its audience to the effect bullying has on children at school. The game consists of two levels each with their own mechanic. In level 1, the player needs to counter the bullies' attempts to distract the player. In level 2, the player must escape the locker room from the bullies after having found their belongings.
Team Size: 8
Project Duration: 3 weeks
Role(s): Game Designer & Team Lead
Project Type: Serious game
Tools: Unity, Figma
My Work
My main role in this project was designing the gameplay of both levels. I was responsible for conceptualizing, prototyping, testing and documenting the core gameplay with the aim of evoking what it could feel like to be bullied in various situations.
Research: I researched the topic of bullying to better understand how bullying takes place and what the effects are on the person getting bullied. This research provided the starting point for developing the game mechanics and to make sure they were relevant to the problem at hand.
Mechanics design: The mechanics were designed to evoke a feeling of stress and tension in the player. The research highlighted that being bullied increases the chances of having depression, anxiety and poor academic performance as results of stress. Both levels try to recreate a different bullying scenario to highlight that bullying can happen in different places and in different ways. When the player messes up during the gameplay, their vision slowly grows darker to try and evoke their mental health degrading. The first level mechanic is a simple minigame of reaction and timing, the player has to counter AIs actions with the right counter action and timing. The sequence of AI actions is predefined, and designed by me, in a way that it is split into 3 stages. Each stage ramps up in difficulty by having less time between actions and by being more tricky with the action combinations.
Level Design: I was responsible for designing the level layout of the second level, since the player can actually move around in that level unlike the first one. In this level, the player is the last one to leave the locker room, but their bully has stayed behind to antagonize them. The player must gather their belongings spread around the locker room and leave the room without the bully catching them. While locker rooms can be very basic and straight forward, I had to get creative with the layout to make the gameplay more interesting and allow the player hide and escape. The layout remains believable for a locker room with straight alleys of lockers but I made sure to vary the layout in the four corners to provide some variety for the player experience. Lastly, I spread the belongings around the room in a way to encourage the player to search the whole level. Some special lockers that allow the player to hide in were spread around the level in areas that were more difficult to escape.
In the initial concept, we had also planned for a third level themed around cyber-bullying. we quickly realised however that 3 weeks was not a lot of time to essentially develop three different minigames, so we decided to focus on the first two levels. Overall I was quite pleased with my involvement in this project. I felt like my design process and ideas fit the theme and task, and I learned how powerful it is to visualise my ideas for communicating them to the team. Despite not having done a lot of prototyping before implementation, the engineers understood my concepts and were able to implement them as I had envisioned.
