Oncor: Super Safe Kids

ONCOR SUPER SAFE KIDS

Title: Lead Designer

Role: Game Designer/Lead Level Designer/Scripter

Company: nonPareil Institute

Platform: Mobile

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Oncor Super Safe Kids is a mobile game targeted at 1st and 2nd graders to teach them how to recognize electrical equipment that they shouldn't mess with. It had to work on iPhone 10 and early generation iPads and be easily understood. I modeled the control scheme off of Roblox so of course the kids all understood it, made the gameplay similar to Pokémon snap which was also very accessible, then led a team of junior level designers to create the level while I did the scripting in Unreal Blueprint. I then made a data driven dialogue/cinematic system for character interactions and made all the cutscenes.

The nonPareil institute is a non profit that teaches adults on the autism spectrum how to make games and software to get them used to being in the workforce. All of my projects were part deliverable product and part learning opportunity for aspiring game developers.

Technical Details

Read on for more details about my work on Oncor Super Safe Kids

Facial Animations

Lacking an animator with the time to help on the project, I had our modeler create a rig with a working jaw and create bland shapes for the characters' faces. Using those blendshapes I procedurally generated talking animation by interpolating between these blend shape values to form different mouth shape phonemes like "O", "La" "Fe" etc. By randomly choosing phonemes and interpolating between them, you get fairly realistic looking facial animations.

Data Driven Dialogue Sequences

While at BioWare I got to see how they handled the massive number of cutscenes effectively. They used a virtual stage and for each line of dialogue they would spawn in the appropriate actors on the correct marks playing the right animations. All this was controlled by a data-table. This means that instead of placing actors by hand and animating them for each line, you simply fill out a spreadsheet.

I implemented the same type of system so each line of dialogue can spawns characters at the appropriate marks within view of a camera at a good angle. I can also override the stage and play a cutscene if I want to incorporate some camera movements or animations that require the actors to move beyond the stage.