SAGA:

Teenage Pet Detective

The project is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and aims to help adolescents on the autism spectrum with interpreting specific social cues.

educational ✔
game design ✔
experience design ✔
3d modeling ✔

About This Work

It’s an experimental educational tool that employs serious game mechanics to design a learning environment that maximzes opportunities for adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder to discover the functional utility of eye gaze and gesture cues.

  • Maya, Mixamo, Plastic SCM, Photoshop, Revit, Rhino, Unity

  • Yumih Chang- Character Design, Character Rigging, Game Design, Scene Design, Storyboarding, 3D Animation, 3D Modeling

    Brian Judy-Storyboarding, Game Design, Game Engineering

    Kira Shumski ‘18- Character Design, Character Rigging, Game Design, Scene Design, Storyboarding, 3D Animation, 3D Modeling

    SAGA Team- Scherf Laboratory at PSU’s Department of Neuroscience

Game Design

In the game, Teenage Pet Detective (TPD), players become a teenage pet detective and interact with 2nd person, human characters to navigate locations, find objects, and solve mysteries.

  • Virtual pets have a long history in computer games and can help to engage players more deeply in a game. This game combines the powerful appeal of the care and feeding of virtual pets with a sequence of mystery storylines where the player must find missing pets and objects.

  • The player will go on numerous quests, which works towards building and solving the missing pet narrative. In order to complete quests, players must complete a few training tasks. Upon successful completion,players gain hints or rewards.

Game Mechanics

The game is organised around three sequential phases. Each phase has multiple levels which are defined by the number of non-verbal cues avatars use to guide participants to solve puzzles in the game.

  • The game is designed to train learning on three functional uses of eye gaze cues.

    1. Use of gaze to reference locations in the world via a single informant

    2. Use of gaze to reference objects in the world via a single informantt

    3. Use of gaze to reference objects in the world via joint attention between multiple informants

  • Tasks are structured to help participants learn that eye gaze is an important cue to solving problems in the game. They help participants learn to estimate precise gaze trajectories by making target gazed-at objects closer together and to ignore salient objects that are not target gazed-at objects.