About this project

The Food Insecurity Experience was my first attempt at a “serious” game. It was created by myself and an artist as a project for a VR class taught at my university. The ultimate goal of this project was to educate people about food insecurity and SNAP, specifically in the state of Texas. For this project, we had to complete a literature study and design document and were responsible for having key milestones (working prototype, environment art, etc.) completed by certain dates. In addition to the design and creation of the VR executable itself, we also had to run a case study to test our project’s ability to raise empathy and awareness for those dependent on SNAP. Ultimately, our results were inconclusive due to our small sample size, but we remain hopeful that this project could be used for good.

My work

  • Programming the UI and parts of the game manager system (ie- managing cart contents, updating food information, etc.)
  • Researching and entering informtion for food’s based on real world data
  • All sound

What I learned

  • VR packages for Unity
  • Development in a 3D environment
  • Dynamic UI (scrollboxes) in Unity

Room for improvement

  • Source Control
  • Designing and planning long-term projects
Click here to download and play the Food Insecurity VR demo.