The Phantom Pain

Trailer for The Phantom Pain.

The Phantom Pain was a game from the idea of combining Mirror Therapy along with Artistic Expression.

Engine - Unity

Team Size - 5 People

Role - Technical Designer + Producer

The Phantom Pain was a short 3-week project that became an interesting look into serious games especially focusing on the experiences of people who have amputations. It also became an interesting look into the development of VR games as well, which as an engineer was a fascinating challenge.

Pre-Production

We were given a very brief introduction into the world of Serious Games and were given The Design Box. We were given our Tech and Aesthetics from the start. Tech was limited to either an AR/VR title so that meant either VR Headsets or Mobile Phones.

Aesthetics were interesting as each team was given a different art style to develop with. Our team was given Surrealism, which is an art style I personally was not very familiar with. We wanted to make a game that could help people but also take as much influence from our art style and make sure we give that justice as well. What we did however is see the actions and motions we could do with VR and made sure to make a list of it. I also made a list of games that I thought had some surrealist visuals or ideas behind them.

From research I realized that Frida Kahlo’s take on Surrealism was to talk about some of her own personal traumas and issues and showcase the thoughts and emotions she felt about it in the artwork. A teammate did a great job of bringing this up and bringing us up to speed as to what the paintings meant and why Frida had decided to paint what she had. This got me thinking that maybe we should work with something with trauma. Now exposure therapy one idea I had during this time, but I realized that you would always need an expert with you while the patient goes through it. I wanted to have an experience that allowed players to perform the actions or go through the actions by themselves as I believe that's the best way to have someone learn,

I started doing more research and I came up with the thought of maybe doing something with amputees and phantom pain. I read about the phenomenon a while back and I remembered it had to do with the brain thinking the arm is still there. That’s when I proposed the idea. I did a little more research and thought we could maybe use mirror therapy as our base and work from there. We had a list of Topics now and we couldn’t really decide on a topic. We needed to talk to an expert and see who we could get, and we decided to make our decision based on that. We also came up with a list of games to see how they’ve tackled some of the issues we had on our list as well.

We talked to the expert and find out that while they have some experience with Phantom Pain, but their expertise was mostly with ASL (American Sign Language). Now ASL could have been an interesting direction to take the project especially with the VRChat community using ASL to communicate popping off recently. However, the more we tried to look into that avenue it felt that it would quickly go out of scope for us and programming to recognize specific hand signs with gestures would’ve been a little too tough of a challenge. I did come up with another idea of maybe using a statue of a hand in the middle of the world and using VR to change the fingers to spell out words. We talked to the expert about the Mirror Therapy idea, and they seemed on board with the idea, however made sure to tell us to be careful when depicting amputees and doing so with respect. After the meeting we had a few directions we could take, but we needed to come to a decision soon. We ended up taking the Amputee idea and just running with it.

Trello Board with Epics and Tasks assigned to one or more members with a place for Quality Control

Production

I looked into different ways that Mirror Therapy was performed in real life and other interactive experiences that have come out before. I broke down the most common exercises which were to stack uneven stones together and move the patients' arms in different directions. What I did for those was to break them down to different movements and see how it can be used with a surrealistic art style.

One thing about Surrealism is to take common objects and to place them in strange and weird positions. For placing the uneven stones together, I thought about initially having different objects and trying to put them together, but it wasn't strange enough. I then thought that maybe different sized animals would be the perfect fit and could lead to wacky and zany creations for the player to make.

Creating strange surrealist chimeras of various animal parts to help motor functions.

When talking about the second exercise we hit a bit of a roadblock thinking what we could do. It was too vague the gestures and was just hard to pin down something fun to do with it. We were also told by our professors that we should avoid taking too much inspiration from titles that already exist and try to go in another direction with the project.

This is what inspired us to go back and re-examine our razer pitch and what we had developed at that point. We could talk another direction which would be to help people with amputees learn how to navigate the world after getting an arm amputated, so to do tasks like tying a virtual shoe or putting on a t-shirt. However, we didn't want our development work to be thrown away and the team had a super limited amount of time to really re-do anything, so we decided to pivot. We decided to twist our idea so that we were showcasing artistic expression with the mirror therapy.

This helped us with our second task of using arm movements to draw on a whiteboard. The "marker" is a random object, and the colors as well are randomly chosen and changes as the player writes, but the player must also use the opposite hand to draw. So, if they have their right hand, they must use their in-game left hand in order to pick up the marker and draw. It's a little disorientating at the start, but once people use it more, they start to get the hang of it and spend more time trying to perfect their drawing.

We finished these two and figured that maybe that we needed a third activity as well as it felt too short. So, we decided to use one of the activities that we talked about when we were thinking of pivoting. It made sense at the moment as we felt behind schedule and we had planned it out entirely as well, so it become more of implementation rather than having to start from scratch. We decided on using the idea of teaching amputees how to open containers using a specially designed machine for them. I coded most of the logic behind this and it was a fun little challenge. I got to make use of Unity's structure system and pivot systems, which I haven't had a chance to use, so it was a nice little thing to learn.

The final day we ran into a lot of issues purely because of the joints. When I was given the assets to replace the temporary assets with it cause a lot of issues with the models stretching too much or taking up weird positions. I had to use some rough ingenuity to fix it and what I essentially did is use the stick piece I was using and roughly adding the necessarily objects where they needed to go around the pivot-based object. I wish I could say that's where the problems ended, but we ran into several other issues. It turns out the pivot doesn't like having it's transformed changed so we couldn't use the same transition we were using for the rest of the activities, where a new table drops in. We thankfully got it figured out, but it honestly was a headache to figure out what we could do to fix it and eventually we just gave the illusion that the table is falling but spawn a table on the ground at the time it falls.

Another issue we had is with our tech artist disappearing and just not giving us any information about that, so we were down by a lot of assets. We had to make do with the assets we had, which turned out to make the world look a lot more Surrealist so maybe it worked in our favor.

Things to Fix

Make it more cohesive

While the game elements do come together as one experience, I think we could have aimed for a more unified experience. I think instead of trying to cram in our third mini game we should've focused on making the flow better.

What we could have done is use context switching for the next, so instead of having the player have to press next on the buttons in the air, the text changes on what the player does instead. It would have made the first and third activity much easier and better to play through. At the current iteration, the player must cycle through the steps and assume they are doing things right, even thought that may be the case. By highlighting and using that metric to change text instead would have made learning less frustrating and more enjoyable for the target audience.

We should have thought of polishing up and combining stuff way before the night before submission.

2. Check in on Teammates

Had we kept a better eye on our technical artist and kept him more involved within the project, I think we wouldn't have had the problem that came up on the last day. By understanding his personal issues, or his seemingly initial avoidance of this project should've set off alarm bells in our head, but we figured we'd get some if not any work from this person. We were re-assured and promised it would be delivered, but honestly, I should have set more strict deadlines with people and keep track of who is kind of where with their tasks and if anything needs to be done about that specific person.

We knew this person was quite busy with their own personal issues, but we didn't realize the extent it went to, which came to bite us later on in the project. Thankfully we did the smart thing and re-appropriated assets that we can created until that point so we could have more interactions without adding more pressure to the artists.

3. Learning to say No

This point ties into point one, but learning to say No, would've helped this project. I think it's important that everyone's voice is heard, but sometimes you just need to put your foot down and say no.

When a teammate wanted to do the third mini game, I had a feeling we may be biting off more than we can chew. During production, we always said if we were done with two, we could then think about adding a third, but I think the two should've been completed or near completion before we decided to do another. Had I said no or brought up the possibility of adding it towards the end of the project, I think we may have had a better flowing experience, which would have felt more engaging for players.

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