Stop and Breathe
Project Overview
Stop and Breathe is an International Award-winning student project from Sheridan College (Ontario, Canada), achieving first place in the Student Category for 2024's Games for Change Awards in New York City.
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The game my team and I made, Stop and Breathe, was a collaborative effort, partnering with Sheridan's Child and Youth Care professor to teach our audience about researched-backed breathing techniques to combat and prevent anxiety attacks.​​ In Stop and Breathe, players play as Ace, a teen suffering from anxiety in a school setting. With the help and guidance of Zen, Ace's companion, players learn how to breathe through and manage anxiety, traverse stressful environments, and solve puzzles to break free of their mind world.
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For this project, my roles consisted of 3D environment design and texture artwork but also consisted of level design, puzzle design, game design, and team management.
​Stop and Breathe was created using Unreal Engine 5 and is downloadable from Steam and Itch.io.​​​
Information
Team Size
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8 Members
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Unreal Engine 5
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3DsMax
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Blender​
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Miro
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Photoshop
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Premier Pro
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Substance Painter
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Substance Designer
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Clickup
Tools Used
Timeline
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8 Months​​​​
Awards and Showcases
My team and I had the privilege of being awarded Best Student Game at the Games for Change Awards in 2024. Members of the team were invited to New York to claim the award and to display our game during the event. This is a great achievement; having learned so much about the field of serious and educational games from this experience.​​​​
Games for Change Awards 2024
Games for Change Awards 2024
3d Environment art
3d Asset Design Overview
I was a 3D artist for the entirety of this project, primarily creating environmental assets, mechanical assets, and shaders using blueprinting, modular textures, high-polys, and UVs. The general inspiration for the art direction was a "stereotypical school setting", using simple pastel colors and shapes to make the environment feel almost toy-like. This design choice is reflected throughout most assets, using simple colors and styles to mimic the feeling.
Inspirations and references
The art direction process started by gathering reference images that were stereotypical depictions of a school setting. This theme was to help players recognize that the character is in a school throughout play. The team agreed on a school theme as most kids and teens have anxiety around school, making this a relatable concept. Some of these references illustrated lockers, bells, desks, chalkboards, balls, buses, and other things seen in a school setting.
Modeling Pipeline
I started by creating blockouts and rough shapes based on metrics, giving the level designers some tools to start designing levels; I designed the modular kit assets and mechanical assets. Using ClickUp and a Spreadsheet, I accounted for a schedule for all the assets needed for the project, sorting them by highest priority to lowest. Each asset went through the pipeline: low poly, high poly, UVs, baking and texturing, and creating modular materials in Unreal Engine 5. Some assets had moving parts, a fan, and a windmill, requiring me to add bones and rig them for the programmers to attach to the animation scripts. I focused on creating all the mechanical attached assets, modular kit pieces, and hero props. In case of time management and crunch, I had a contingency plan to add assets from free assets packs as a last resort.
Modularity and textures
Some assets I created required different materials or changing colours during gameplay. As textures can be expensive for run time, I made the blueprints modular, so the programmers had an easier time configuring them when needed. Modularity helped keep the same textures while changing the colours based on parameters set in the blueprint.
Throughout this project, I learned how integral optimization is when it comes to textures and assets alike. I tried new things, like packing multiple assets inside the same UV sheets, Textile density, texture modularity, trim sheets, and shader coding. I can't wait to learn more about this pipeline!
Level Design
Level Design Overview
I was one of the 4 level designers on the project. My main goals were to create more challenging puzzles later on and the hub world for the player to return to. A beat map was created to show the other level designers which mechanics they would have to use in their puzzle design. We also wanted more focused moments for players to engage and practice their breathing, so the hub was used to have longer breathing segments before going on to the next set of levels.​​​​
LDD and Beat map
I created an overarching beat map for the game, depicting where mechanics should be taught, tested, and challenged, using each level to introduce a new mechanic. The game was planned to have four levels, each with three puzzles, teaching, testing, and challenging each mechanic while adding previously taught mechanics into the mix.
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​Level 1 taught players the primitive mechanics of raising and lowering the platforms and putting the books into the bookshelves.
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Level 2 showed players the fans and how the player could change the direction of the fans, use them to get to higher elevations, and move books.
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Level 3 is all about rotating platforms, using them to jump across openings or reach inaccessible areas.
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Level 4 was to start challenging the player with some puzzles and mechanics. We introduced the idea of different colored books and used all mechanics in the tandem for the final puzzle.
Teach/Test/Challenge Design
Early Renditions
Hub LEvel DEsign
I chose to implement a hub based level design for a few different reasons. The main reason was to bring players back to to the hub and preform a longer breathing cycle before they where able to move onto the next level. This was a good way to break up the pacing of the levels, but to also show the players that they have been making progress. Each time the player breathed back in the hub, the hubs colour/saturation slightly came back, a wall to the ending was removed, and a new door opened. This hub based level design took inspiration from a few other games like Super Mario 64, Spiro, and Ugly, all using the hub area to practice mechanics once taught to them, and to illustrate all the progress the player has made.
The hub started relatively small, having a door way in each corner of the room. This became problematic, as players had a hard time noticing the doors in the forefront and was awkward to walk towards the camera given our locked perspective. I moved over to making the hub bigger and longer to support openings for the 4 different levels, as well as adding an opening for the ending in the middle. This let me add different mechanics to be necessary to accessing the different levels as there was more space to play with, reinforcing teaching moments of the different mechanics.
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I worked along side our concept artist to create the vision of the hub to make it feel like this grand school atrium that had been put into chaos by anxiety, putting the breathing circle in the middle to show its importance. As the player breathed when returning from the levels, I wanted them to feel like this hub was becoming safer, and calmer as the result of their breathing, hoping to influence them to preform it in real life for similar effects.
Puzzle Design
As Stop and Breathe had 4 level designers, I had to split the work up amongst the group, designing 2 puzzles in level 4, these people puzzles 10, and puzzle 12. Level 4 was designed to slightly challenge the player on the mechanics they have learned throughout playing, while also making one of the previously taught mechanics a little more complex.
Instead of needing to just put a book into a bookshelf to activate something, players had to place the right colour book into the corresponding bookshelf. This added some more mechanical depth to puzzles 11 and 12. ​​
Puzzle 10 (4.1)
Puzzle 10 introduced this concept of book colours in a very simple puzzle of going back and forth to access both books and bring them to the exit, using some of the mechanics from the previous levels, like balloon platforms and fans.
This puzzle is merely an ice breaker towards the final two puzzles of the game.
Puzzle 12 (4.3)
Puzzle 12 was the final puzzle of the game. I wanted this last puzzle to utilize the all the knowledge the player had collected over the course of their playthrough, using every mechanic that had been thought to them.
This is an order of operations puzzle, as it is designed for a younger audience, it still requiers some thought from the player of what to do next.
Game DEsign
Game Design Overview
Since the our bachelors was in Game Design, we all took a role in the over all design of the game, its mechanics, its movement, its metrics, perspective, etc. Some of these design decisions were split amongst the team to solve in a quick manner, to later be revised and polished in our weekly scrums. Other design problems were tackled as a group, we treated these as proper scrum sessions, all creating ideas to tackle the issue individually, then coming together to share and create a solid solution.
The areas that I had more influence over were the breathing system and the windmill system. As the breathing mechanic was integral to our messaging, we needed to collectively put the most amount of effort and time into creating this system and making sure it properly taught players about the benefits and strategies of breathing to tackle anxiety.
Breathing System
The breathing system is the most integral mechanic to Stop and Breathe, being the main drive of our narrative, message, and gameplay. We put a lot of time refining this process, some members taking the time to make sure the controls felt just right, the feel of the sequence was perfect, how often the player needed to use the system, how long each breath would take, and a system to be more forgiving if the player messed up the timings. I worked directly along side Adam Pacheco to design the step by step process of breathing and the visual representation within the game.
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We designed the breathing circle to represent lungs, where colours on the ground would flow through to represent the breathing process. We wanted to give players a visual progress meter to showcase the time remaining or needed for each breathe, coming up with using crystals on the circle, reducing cognitive overload with more UI on the screen.
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The breathing circle is meant to feel like a familiar safe space for the player; a point of interest for the player to seek out in levels. This lead to the decision to make it always in colour, to stand out and give players a direction to go to inside the puzzles.
We also added a ticking sound effect for players to follow along with for breathing. Since this breathing sequence is meant to calm players down, using a timer, a clock, or any explicit time indicator could enduce anxiety in the player. We had to consider the player for every step of the process, test, and then iterate to improve the feel for breathing.
Collaborators
