Little Directors is an interactive, choice-driven kids' game built in Unity by a team of 5, mixing digital gameplay with real-world Arduino hardware. The game plays out on a screen while kids sit in a physical room watching the story unfold. When the main character hits a critical decision or obstacle, the players have to hunt around the real room to find physical figurines, then scan them using an NFC reader. Scanning the correct item essentially "teleports" it into the game to help the character and branch the storyline.
As the Technical Game Designer, I worked on the initial design and prototyping loops, handled some of the 3D modeling and texturing, and even produced the soundtrack and recorded voice lines. On the tech side, my biggest contribution was writing the code to bridge the Arduino NFC hardware inputs directly into Unity to make the scanning mechanic actually work.
For the soundtrack, I wanted something high-energy and bright, so I composed a fast-paced, upbeat track heavily inspired by the bouncy, chaotic vibe of Bad Piggies. Aside from the music, I recorded and edited the voice lines for the game's narrator to help guide the kids through the story. I also designed and implemented the custom sound effects for the NFC reader, giving players that crucial, satisfying audio feedback the exact second a physical figurine is successfully scanned and registered by the hardware.
I handled a mix of the technical pipeline, audio, and core prototyping for this project. On the hardware and code side, I manually programmed the Arduino, wrote the specific data to the physical NFC chips, and engineered the communication system in Unity so it could seamlessly receive hardware inputs over a USB serial port. For the visuals, I built several of the 3D objects and used a base cardboard texture that our artists could layer images on top of. I also wrote the game’s initial one-pager, contributed heavily to designing the core gameplay loops during prototyping, and produced the entire audio suite including the soundtrack, sound FX, and narrator voiceovers.