This was my graduation project, lasting 5 months, during which I researched how gameplay that suits the player’s stress type (i.e. “fight or flight” or “tend & befriend”) might promote engagement and increase satisfaction. From this project I gathered new perspectives on the inner workings of stress and how to design around them.

I enjoyed seeking and applying inspiration from nature and practised conceptualising, prototyping mechanics, setting up research, playtesting, designing behaviour trees, and programming in Unity, C# and Shader Graph. 

Want to learn more? Click here to view my research paper (PDF)!