Adrift is an immersive VR experience designed in Unity. In Adrift, our group would like our audience to feel emotionally connected, thus being able to empathize with young children through a first-person simulation of the children's perspective in their dream.

Our story is about parenting and spending more time with loved ones. The primary goal is to raise awareness in the fact that adults in today’s society are often too busy with work and neglect the importance of ensuring their children’s safety, both mentally and physically.

As the director of the project, I started by understanding WHAT experience I wanted the audience to receive. I started by researching some topics that I felt important to our generation. After multiple research sessions, we came to the conclusion that child negation has been a huge problem in recent years and I decided that it would be great if we could bring awareness to the player. After receiving positive feedback from both our professor and people we interviewed, we moved onto the next stage of the project.

The next step I took was to ideate HOW I wanted to tell the story. My main focus is to create an experience that doesn't bring a headache and dizziness to the user. Therefore, I decided to create a sitting experience which the user doesn't need to move around within the game, and everything is guided by the experience itself.

After that, I was able to work closely with our level designer and we were able to map out exactly what type of experience and dialog that we want the user to feel. The level designer and I had dozens of sessions which we mapped out our level as detailed as possible within the time limit. After that, I wrote out the script for the story within each level and discussed with our voice actor how I wanted her to voice out the protagonist (she did a fantastic job on that).

Finally, during the exposition, we received many positive feedbacks from the audience. Many parents felt really sad and relatable to the narrative. Overall, it was a very successful project.