Royal Concerns

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Inspiration

In 2016, a former employee from Parents for Community Living created a budgeting and financial decision-planning game in Excel that was designed to help youth with developmental disabilities prepare for post-secondary and get them the opportunity to simulate real-life decisions. So we made an interactive digital literacy life skills game, because we immediately understood how much of an impact they can make, as we also loved their core values and their enthusiasm.

What it does

Royal Concerns provides young adults with developmental disabilities the opportunity to simulate their financial decisions where they are being put in charge of a royal kingdom, and bring those financial literacy and soft skills they developed in game to real life. The game combines elements of Blooket, and rogue-like gameplay to teach these people budgeting and financial decision-making. They have the ability to walk around the map, explore, and interact with other characters. The single player allows participants to explore a third person kingdom perspective, interact with NPCs powered by ElevenLabs, and progress through levels involving financial challenges that people encounter in daily life. You also have the option to play with a classroom in multiplayer mode.

How we built it

Making a 3d game accessible AND cross play across all devices was definitely a challenges hopping from engine to engine making something that feels smooth in time. Luckily, the React Three Fiber library includes so many wonderful optimizations that allowed us to not only have complete creative control making our scenes and assets in blender, but could also rendered compressed files seamlessly. The ElevenLabs native orchestration and real-time conversational AI not only allowed us to make an experience where player's gameplay is tailored to their playstyle, but also allowed those with developmental disabilities to get practice with learning through conversation.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges that we ran into was delivering and transporting the game into mobile, due to the nature of building an optimized web game to mobile requiring several hours on our current personal computers, we have had to work around testing, and experimenting with the mobile native features due to the time constraint as well. Fortunately, the game was built and tested to run cross platform, and we were also able to use android IOS for phone and tablet playing alongside a laptop host without significantly reframing any frame drops. We didn't have time to run the multiplayer mode for the game, so that was another challenge that we faced.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some major accomplishments that we are proud of was successfully implementing ElevenLabs and using voice feature for us to add and use, in order to develop the feature of having the NPCs whom the user interacts with have voices built into the game. We are also very pleased that our peers got fully immersed in the world when player, and of course that the game features worked as expected.

What we learned

We learned from our mentors that teaching collaboration and kindness above all else is what should be the foundation of building wealth within a society of other kind & functioning individuals. Our minds were also opened to how much more immersive sound design and voices make an experiences - as a human with auditory attention, hearing different voices and procedurally generated soundtracks based on the NPC and happiness level of the kingdom is really what we found was the difference between a prototype and a game we couldn't let go of.

What's next for Royal Concerns

For next steps, we of course would like to put this game into the hands of the people supported by Community Living KW. Once on a production website that all students can get the experience to play (and hopefully learn from!) we would be incredibly interested in finding deterministic factors that we can measure the teachings from the game on student's development.