September 2021 – June 2022

I was the Unity developer for this project developed by Part Time Evil in collaboration with Virginia Commonwealth University. I was responsible for all of the game play processes, scene transitions, AI logic, and data collection. The idea of the social experiment is to make the user think they are playing with two other participants, but who are actually computer programmed. The user steadily gets excluded more and more by the other players as the scenarios progress, eventually to the point of kicking out the real user.

The two AI players are controlled by a state machine reliant on branching paths of logic depending on who the player passes to when. This is to have a specific amount of passes the players receive every scenario to help keep the study consistent and eliminate complete randomness. Because of this, the game manager and other processes had to be completely error proof to not deviate from the expected outcome (endless hours of testing and troubleshooting).

A variety of data is recorded to a spreadsheet stored on the Meta Quest. This includes the onboarding, post-round assessments, who the user blasted the orb to, user response time per question, and aggression response measured in amount of time the user held down the trigger to blast the orb.