Enactus NTU

GDD Recruitment Leaflet Brief

• University society for social change in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

• Serious/applied game with a branching narrative to be used in knife crime prevention workshops.

• Technical lead responsible for establishing the resources required for the project and creating a production plan to be communicated with other departments.

• Worked as technical narrative designer and writer using the potential of VR to build empathy in Nottingham youths.

• Project also designed to allow teenagers to practice what they’ve learned from first aid charity partner.

• Part of presentation team that successfully secured funding on multiple occasions and won Enactus Most Innovative Project of the Year 2022.

In the final months of my degree, I was approached by the new president of Enactus NTU, Connor Farrell. His proposal: to collaborate on a project with the aim to reduce knife crime in Nottingham by building empathy in youths through the use of virtual reality. Our role was to create a branched narrative game on the topic of knife crime, to show teenagers the possible consequences of their actions, and how to make better choices.

Coming from under-privileged areas of the city where knife crime is a reality, I chose to accept this opportunity to do something about it and began working with Enactus.

Originally, it seemed that we would not have enough members with the necessary technical skills to make significant progress before I graduated but given the importance of such a project within a city that had the UK’s second highest crime rate, I wrote a brief and a basic GDD to give my successor a strong foundation and assisted Enactus on their recruitment leaflet.

However, as I enrolled in part-time languages the following academic year, I technically counted as a student again and was able to join Enactus in full. From there I was given the position of technical lead, responsible for the core game design and programming in VR. Shortly after re-joining the project, I was invited to join Connor and the vice-president, Yumna, in London for the EY Showcase to present our project at a competition and networking event… Which we won!

Since then, we developed the project further and on top of being the technical leader, I was promoted to a full project lead as well. It has changed direction slightly, as we discussed plans to partner with a first aid charity and use VR to give students an opportunity to test how much they’ve learned from said charity. We had also partnered with the Pythian Club, who work with at risk youths, and Stone Soup Academy, an alternative provision school where we planned to conduct our pilot.

Since the EY Showcase, we also won the SAP Partner Competition, and then made it to the National semi-finals. Though we were only a runner up for presenting at the National Expo, my project won the award for Most Innovative Project.

With my journey to Japan approaching, I handed over the framework I’d created in UE4 and any relevant documents to prepare my successor to continue this valuable project.