Turning a Room into a Story
When I joined a team developing a new kind of interactive game experience—one that invited players to talk, move, and collaborate without a traditional controller—I didn’t realize how experimental the journey would be. Our goal was to blur the line between story and space: to transform familiar environments into something playful and alive through voice, light, and shared discovery.
The challenge was twofold: designing interactivity remotely, while needing to test it in person. We built and animated scenes from across time zones, then gathered for short, intense playtest sessions to feel how the experience actually landed. What seemed clear in documentation or storyboards often shifted dramatically when real players entered the mix. How they spoke, when they hesitated, where their curiosity took them.
As the animation lead, I focused on crafting the emotional “onramps” of the experience, the cinematic and narrative beats that set the tone before gameplay began. These short sequences were about anticipation and empathy. Even without traditional controllers or screens, we found that timing, pacing, and body language still carried emotional weight. Every gesture or line of dialogue had to feel natural enough that players believed in the world and wanted to step further into it.
Creating emotional moments in an interactive, voice-driven environment meant constantly balancing narrative and technology. A single spoken phrase could spark connection, or confusion. We learned to choreograph dialogue and visuals as if conducting a conversation: give players room to breathe, react, and feel seen.
By the time we brought groups together for live testing, the payoff was powerful. Watching players uncover secrets, laugh in recognition, and celebrate together reminded us that the real magic of games isn’t just interactivity, it’s emotion. It’s the shared sense of wonder when technology disappears and people feel part of a story they helped shape.
That project reinforced something I carry into every new challenge: no matter how innovative the tech, what players remember are the moments that make them feel connected.
