Opening Opportunities - 2017
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Opening Opportunities is a mentoring project created by Microsoft YouthSpark, Microsoft Romania and Techsoup Association, for students passionate about IT. My classmates and me applied for the first time in 2017.
First, we had to choose a mentor and after some Skype calls, we had to come up with an idea for a project. After many heated debates, our team decided on an educational video game, meant to raise awarness about Alzheimer's disease. The final name for our project was "BLANK" and our next task was to distribute our roles. We had a project manager, script writers, designers, programmers, testers and salesmen. I was one of the two script writers and designers, working on the story itself and designing some of the assets and scenes. Due to the small number of team members, every single one of us had to voice act at least one character.
The final game has two separate endings, depending on the choices made by the player. Apart from the project itself, our team had to shoot several update videos, in which we explained our progress to a team of judges from Microsoft.
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For our project, we used Blender, Unity, After Effects, Cinema 4D and Adobe Photoshop.
The game is about life from the perspective of a man named John Doe, who finds out that he suffers from Alzheimer's disease. The story follows some moments from his life, such as his sons's graduation or a normal day at the supermarket.
Moreover, we hosted an event at a local cafe, where people could test out a demo version of our game.
The "BLANK" team passed the first stage of the contest and after aproximately 5 months, we managed to become finalists in the Opening Opportunities mentoring project. For the final stage we had to go to Bucharest and attend the final event.
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What I learned from this project is that I shouldn't underestimate what a team of ambitious people can achieve. My team and I managed to write a story, design stages, code, voice act and write a selling pitch for a video game in a short amount of time.
Furthermore, I got to experience working on a real team project and learn about time management, collaboration, and how to put my ideas into practice.