Vesalius Trust-A-Thon Competition: 2nd Place
Vesalius Trust-A-Thon
2024
Audience
High school students and undergraduates
Team
Alex McDonough, Leah Balsan, Lauren Kawamura, Sara Lung, Nolan Pakizer, Raisa Rodríguez, Helen Thio
My Role
Pre-Production, Animation
Timeline
2 weeks in Fall of 2023
Tools
Unity Engine, Adobe Illustrator, After Effects, Cinema 4D, Blender, Figma, Soundtrap
Description
Based on the MAPK/ERK signaling pathway, Captain Gap: Station Master, introduces the audience to an important signaling pathway associated with many cancers via a fun mini-game. This game was entered into the 2023 Vesalius Trust-a-Thon fundraising event in order to bridge the gap between the serious topic of cancer and young learners in a fun and innocuous way. We competed with a multidisciplinary graduate student team for a week-long design sprint against other graduate teams and professional studios in North America and placed second overall in the competition.
The Process
The Problem
The challenge for this project was:
How to gamify the MAPK/ERK pathway
How to make our molecular pathway game appealing to our audience
Design Goals
Create a minigame that is scientifically accurate with gameplay that reflects factors in the molecular pathway
Design a themed game that looks enticing and polished to a general audience
Focus on a simplified product that fits our timeline
Pre-Production
After researching, pitching, and choosing a game idea, team members helped to create a style guide that would inform character designs, environment, and 3D assets.
Designers were most comfortable modeling assets in Blender, which made it easy to import models into Unity.
Animation
Animations were made in C4D and Adobe After Effects.
The starry night background and 2D assets such as the timer were the main animations needed.
UI/UX Design
The UI format of the game was designed in Figma. Low-fidelity wireframes were drawn up to map user interactions and then imported into Adobe Illustrator.
Assets were created to match the space theme style guide. These assets were given functionality in Unity.
Social Media
A large portion of the project involved game promotion and fundraising for the Trust-a-Thon.
The social media team created a schedule for social media posting and a style guide and template were used to keep posts cohesive.
Post format and story format on platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook were used to advertise the game.
Programming
The mini-game was developed in Unity 2022.3.
The first week incorporated drafting gameplay, level design, and prototyping the main game mechanics into Unity.
The second week incorporated transferring finished assets into the game, adding animations, and transferring the separately programmed UI file to the main prototype.
The last two days were dedicated to debugging and polishing the game.
Result
Our team got exponential engagement and received around 500 likes in total in less than two weeks on Instagram.
Our team’s effort resulted in fundraising over $831 on GoFundMe.
Our team placed 2nd in the competition.
Feedback
The game would benefit from further playtesting and user engagement for the purpose of debugging.
Players have reported that gameplay is too hard and could be adjusted or better scaffolded.
The game needs to be built out to WebGL for easy access.