BrainInc

Project Overview

🛠 Tools:

• Unity
• C#
• HTC Vive and Rift S

💡 Technical Skills Applied:

• Working with VR technology
• Simple AI pathfinding

🤝 Soft Skills:

• Documentation for future interns
• Brainstorming new ideas
• Planning
• Team leadership (managing 1 programmer and working with 1 artist)

Notice

This page is unfinished as of now.
I wanted to post this WIP version since the website for the game has been taken down and I still want to show this game on my portfolio. There will be some text here already, but please keep in mind that this post is incomplete.

Introduction

This post is about a game called Brain Inc, a game that I worked on during my Internship at StennizWorkshops in 2022.
The studio and game as well its design documents were in Dutch and thus had to be translated. I will make sure to leave the full dutch text below my translations to make sure you can check the original source yourself.
I also did make sure to ask Dennis Renkema, the owner of StennizWorkshops whether I could post the content I worked on during my time there before I left and he said that I could.

The game was supposed to be a virtual reality experience where the player, in creative ways, was supposed to experience what it feels like to have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where some tasks will take longer and be more difficult, kind of like what a person with autism experiences on a daily basis. The goal of the game is to provide recognition and/or understanding.
Dutch quote from the documentation:
Brain inc is een virtual reality experience /game waarin de speler op een creatieve manier autisme ervaren. de game speelt zich af in een fabriek die de hersenen van iemand met ASS (autisme spectrum stoornis) voorstellen hier moet de speler verschillende taken uitvoeren die laten zien sommige dingen lastiger/meer tijd kosten voor iemand met ASS. Het doel van de game is om herkenning en/of begrip te geven.

The target demographic was people who either have ASD or are around people who do have it, not only children, but also adults so that they can understand what people with ASD go through.

During the project, I was the lead programmer of this project. There was 1 programmer also working on this project and there was 1 artist, who worked on both this project and the other game that was being worked on by (if I recall correctly) 3 other interns, from the same school as me.
Brain Inc was started by a previous intern during the previous internship. Dennis liked the idea so much that he allowed the intern to work on this game, writing documentation as well as doing general project work. I believe he was on his own but I don’t recall exactly. When the project was given to me, I had about 2 weeks to ask questions to the original creator, which wasn’t required too much as there wasn’t that much there yet, as is expected of a single intern during one internship where they had to start creating a game themselves.

During the project I worked on pretty much everything related to the game. I came up with numerous ideas for “levels”, created those levels together with the other intern on the project and updated the documentation to make sure the next interns could continue our work. More details on what exactly I worked on will be in the Project Work section, but a small summary is as follows:

• Small minigames, where the user has to interact with the environment in order to complete simple tasks
• Create a small AI (not the generating kind) robot ally that would follow the player around and be nice and give helpful tips
• Documentation

As you may have guessed from my uses of past tense however, it appears that this project has been shut down, I assume somewhere in 2023, as that is when the last push to the Github was as of creating this blog post. The site has been taken down, the Gaming part of his company doesn’t seem to have any active webpages, including other games made in the past and the projects all seem pretty much dead. Of course this is purely speculation as I have not spoken to Dennis in years.

Project Work

Coming at a later date
There is quite a lot to go through so this might take a while