Serious Game VR
Unreal Engine | Github | Miro | Google Docs
Production type : School Project
Production time : 3th november to 5th december 2025
This project is a Serious Game in VR that aims to help people who have difficulty extending their elbow improve the limb's motor skills in a fun way. At the beginning of the exercise, the game measures the patient's actual elbow extension range. The game then sets metrics according to the data, giving the patient an accurate score while playing based on their elbow maximum extension range.
Context
In second year, we had to create a serious game using the VR support to learn new genre and devices. A list a 5 hypothetical patients suffering from physiotherapy issues was presented to us and each group had to pick one. Then, we designed a game around the patient's condition, aiming to create a product medically useful and enjoyable. Each group of game designer were associated to a group of students from the 3D branch, charged to make the game and level art based on 2 mandatory themes. Our group included 3 game designers and 7 artists, their mandatory theme being : rooftop cyberpunk and voldemort's bathroom.
My role on the project
During the production, I was in charge of being lead programmer and game design assistant.
My contribution on the project
- Adjustables parameters
- Score and player precision
- Playtesting and QA
- VR Programmation
- Design of the exercice
- Tutorialisation and calibration
Design of the exercice
To work on the elbow extension mechanism in a fun way, we based our concept and therapeutic exercise on the following gimmick: targets are positioned in the level facing the player. After a calibration phase, the goal is to shoot at the targets by extending the elbow through its full range of motion. The game provides audio feedback when the player hits a target, as well as an accuracy score.
Calibration system
Before starting the exercice, the patient has to go through a calibration phase to adjust the play to the patient's maximum elbow extension range. When the player enters a level for the first time, he is welcomed by a tutorial guiding him through the steps of the calibration
The calibration works in 2 steps :
- First, the player places his arm in neutral position and press an input. The system use this pose as reference value for minimal elbow extension.
- Then, keeping the same posture, the player has to extend his arm to his maximum painless extension and press the same input again. Doing so, the system stores this second pose as maximum extension.
Finally during the game, these 2 poses are used as references to calculate the player precision on every shoot. This precision percentage can then be used by the physiotherapist to keep track of the patient evolution.
Adjustables parameters
To better tailor the game to the patient's comfort and accessibility, we have added various settings that allow for the adjustment of the game's core parameters. The parameters allows to set the number of repetitions in a set and to choose the hand to play with. We also noticed during playtest that players usually done the first calibration wrong so we added to possibility to reinitialize the calibration if the first one did not work.
Although our team wanted to add more options to really fit the patient needs, the lack of time prevented us from adding more settings.