Brain Agents

Game Design/Programming/UI

Brain Agents is a web browser and mobile game developed using Unity WebGL by Night City and produced by STRYV365. It aims to teach social and emotional coping skills and foster resilience for youths in the Milwaukee public school system. Teaching high level concepts in a fun and interactive context presented a lot of unique challenges for us as designers.

My Contributions

My role on the project was game designer and programmer. On a small team of only about seven of us (total, not just designers) wearing multiple hats at all times was mandatory to succeed. My contributions on the project range from UI/UX design to dialogue writing to mechanic design/mechanic programming.

Player Room Upgrade System

We needed a way to gate the content of the player’s customizable room and create some sort of meta progression for the feature. My solution was to design and implement a system that allowed the player to spend currency to upgrade their room and gain more access to it.

Original mockup for the game flow and UI

Fully implemented feature

In order to simulate realistic examples of social learning, we decided we needed a way for the player to build relationships with the various NPCs in the game. I designed and implemented a system that tracks an NPC’s trust value with the player and created tools to allow our designers to change these values from our dialogue system.

Example functionality

Players can gain the trust of different NPCs in the game to unlock new dialogue options and rewards for their room.

Player Room UI

As a part of revamping our customizable player room feature, I was tasked with remaking and improving the UI. Below is a quick before and after look at the UI/UX.