Taking Flight

• 

  TF-Collage

Inspiration

Upon meeting with our team, we found out that most of us are international students and shared similar experiences upon coming to college. We've faced difficulties that others (even ourselves) failed to realize beforehand, and there were no resources for us to simulate what we'll face after arriving in a foreign country. We want to share our experiences with other international students and the general public. Some scenarios include the feeling of uncertainty over the visa application process - because you're not alone - and restrictions on eligibility for financial aid and access to work experience due to having foreign citizenship.

By shedding light on what international students might face in the future, our project helps incoming international students think through what they need to prepare and expect. We also considered how this information could be presented - because we're already overwhelmed with all the packets and documents sent to us for orientation.

What it does

That's why we came up with the idea of creating a visual novel built by international students for incoming international students. In this social impact game, we use interactive storytelling to immerse players in real situations international students inevitably encounter.

Taking Flight takes the player through a series of choices to place themselves in the shoes of a soon-to-be international college student. For incoming international students, this game could provide them a feel for what their experience could be like when moving in. Instead of simply throwing out overwhelming situations at the player, we also included many helpful information so that they can come prepared.

For local students, international student offices, and those that will be interacting with international students in general, they will get a chance to empathize with the situation that international students are facing.

We designed it so that, while there is no right or wrong answer, every decision has its own consequence and impacts what scenarios are encountered in the future. There are multiple endings you can reach based on the decisions you make throughout the game, and at that point we recap some of the opportunity costs and tradeoffs you made.

How we built it

We brainstormed the possible issues that could overwhelm an international student upon coming to another country for college, adapt them into scenarios and dialogues, and come up with logical connections between every choice to make them into a coherent story.

To turn the story into an interactive game, we use the renpy framework to create a visual novel of the first year of college of an international student. We have different variables to keep track of how the players are doing in different categories and choices that will trigger different scenes and outcomes.

Challenges we ran into

Since renpy is a new framework to all of us, we have to quickly get familiar with the coding conventions of renpy and make sense of everything while we code. It's also a challenge turning our own experiences as international students into a story that is more universal and informative.

The biggest challenge we ran into should be two of our teammates dropped out after we had planned our project, and turned us from a 5-person group into a 3-person group. We each had to take on a much larger workload, and had to modify our vision for the minimum viable product to make sure we could finish in time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our story encompasses our experiences and addresses what we care about. It includes useful information like the list of documents we need to prepare and procedures that we need to go through to better prepare international students for college . We also learned to use renpy and Github in a really short amount of time. And now we have a full-fledged game that anyone can play in the form of an executable!

What we learned

We learned the basics of renpy and github, and we also learned a lot about game design.

What's next for Taking Flight

With more time, we would create a more in-depth story with more options to choose from, more possible matters we could run into, and really make use of some of the variables (like physical/mental health) we created to bring attention to more problems.


Built With

• renpy