Operation: Heal Up

Inspiration

A lot of information related to health is difficult to understand. We wanted to make a game where you can learn about different sorts of injuries and how they're related to the body's functions in a fun, interactive way.

What it does

The game lets users learn about the character's injuries and how people heal from those injuries.

How we built it

We used the Unity game engine with C#. For the art, we used Procreate and IbisPaint.

Challenges we ran into

We created all the art by hand and thus, had to reference many technical images, and understand exactly what we were educating our audience about. There was also a lot of intentionality with what we were creating, which ended up taking a bit of time. One of our biggest issues was the suturing game, which we had a lot of ideas for, but unfortunately, had to implement a much simpler than anticipated version of. We additionally had trouble with the dialogue---using Unity's UI elements was quite difficult! Switching scenes and understanding how Unity deals with version control also posed big problems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We came into this project with very ambitious ideas and are really really happy about the huge amount of progress we made! There are so many moving parts to our game and we're so proud of ourselves for being able to implement it all. Additionally, we loved how our character designs really emphasize diversity and hope to continue onwards with that aspect.

What we learned

None of us had experience with Unity or game development in general and only one of us knew C# beforehand. Additionally, one of our members did not know how to code at all. We all learned a lot about the language, how to implement games in Unity, and character design!

What's next for Operation: Heal Up

As a team made up of women of color, we hope to use this game to further education on WOC's health, an area in which there is very little known. In the future, we hope to focus on health issues that primarily affect WOC as a way to lessen the gap in the lack of understanding of such an important topic.