SugarVita - Social & Health Game
Daan van Eijl | HRH Diabetes Games + TU/e | Spring 2022
Welcome to my portfolio for the graduation internship, spring 2022. On this page you'll find a reading guide in which my portfolio structure is clarified which should help you navigate to the desired pages. It also gives you more information about the project, stakeholders and design challenge.
Reading Guide
To get a better idea of the project, you should first read the project description below this reading guide. All information regarding the project is specified there. You can also find a link to the key information document.
Once you have a general idea of the project I worked on, I advise navigating to the Learning Outcomes page. There you'll find all the outcomes + a description of how I worked on that learning outcome and/or links to Devlog pages with a small explanation on why the entry would be linked to the learning outcome.
You can find all Devlog pages in the navbar, so it's easy to find a specific entry.
Some Devlog entries link to Stepping Stones. These show the results of certain features/products. This can for example be a document, link to product or a short movie that explains the results.
Finally I've added a reflection at the bottom of this page which shows my experience and thoughts on the internship and what I learned from it. I also reflect on the project in general and if the design challenges were successful.
Project Description
Key Information
The key information document contains student and company details with a signing from Danilo
General
- Diabetes Simulator (TU/e Biomedical Engineering + MMC)
- SugarVita (HRH Diabetes Games)
- GameBus (TU/e)
The Diabetes Simulator is used to get data from people with Diabetes to be able to use this data accurately in SugarVita. It was made in a coöperation between TU/e Biomedical Engineering department and the MMC hospital.
SugarVita is the game which is used for players to experiment and learn more about Diabetes. This is what I have worked on.
Lastly, GameBus is used as a platform for people to connect and to be able to create challenges for each other. When a player wants to save their playthrough, it will be stored on GameBus and they can share it with their groups.
Reason for project
The game was initially made by a game development company hired by TU/e, but after a while, the contract between them and TU/e was terminated leaving TU/e with an unfinished game. This is the reason that TU/e decided to start hiring game design students to expand on the already existing game which was clearly not at the level they wanted it to be at.
Stakeholders
This project is bigger than just me working on a simple game for people's amusement. There are multiple stakeholders involved all with a completely different background.
My job is to expand on SugarVita with the game design skills that I have. This is mostly designing and programming technical features, but also some UI and other visual things like icons. My role in communication is to bring all stakeholders together by sending emails, creating meetings and explaining my work in those meetings.
The other stakeholders are:
- Jasper Cuelenaere (other game design graduate student) will also work on SugarVita. We mostly work on different tasks, but always work closely together.
- Danilo Ferreira de Carvalho is the person I work closest with besides Jasper and he's my company mentor. He is a MSc in Computer Engineering and is now a PhD Candidate. He doesn't work on the game itself, but he knows mostly how it's structured and always knows what I'm working on. He gives feedback regarding the game, but also personal feedback to make sure I'm doing fine when it comes to Fontys.
- Harm Haak is the project owner and the initial innovator of SugarVita. He is an internist at MMC Eindhoven who focusses on endocrinology. He has frequent contact with people suffering from Diabetes and wants to help these patients, he partnered with TU/e to start the development of SugarVita. He doesn't know a lot about the technical details, but he does know what the game is supposed to bring forth in Diabetes patients and with that he has valuable input when it comes to early concepting and target audience knowledge.
- Pieter Van Gorp is an associate professor at the School of Industrial Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He works at the Information Systems lab, with a primary focus on digital health tools. He is the project owner of a platform known as GameBus. "My aim is to put citizens in charge of their personal health data."[1] This quote shows his priorities and he wants SugarVita to help with this in combination with GameBus. He manages data and works together with us to create a very accurate game with easy data to read for the player and to use GameBus as a platform to bring SugarVita players together.
- Natal van Riel is Professor of Biomedical Systems Biology at the department of Biomedical Engineering (research group Computational Biology) at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he leads the Systems Biology and Metabolic Diseases research program. He is also part-time Professor of Computational Modelling at Amsterdam University Medical Centers (location AMC, University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Medicine). Natal is the project owner of the Diagame project (Biomedical Engineering + SugarVita + GameBus) and also of the Diabetes Simulator.
- Vadym Markelov is a software developer at GameBus. Whenever a GameBus functionality doesn't work in SugarVita, I can always contact him to come to a fitting solution.
Expected End Product
It is expected that I develop a virtual opponent which the player can play against. This virtual opponent will be created by people themselves. This way, people can learn from themselves and from others. After this it is my job to find more ways on how to give the player more options to accurately simulate their daily lives or to try things out and see what it does to their blood sugar levels.
Here follow the design challenges and the devlog entries that correspond to that design challenge.
"Design a virtual opponent for an already existing game made for diabetes patients, so they can play against themselves and others in order to learn how to cope with their disease and to get a better idea of how others manage their lives with diabetes."
How can I use GameBus as a platform to connect SugarVita players?
How can I save SugarVita data in GameBus so people can see when they played SugarVita?
How can I fetch data from GameBus so people can play against their own and other's playthroughs?
"Design new features for SugarVita to enable patients with diabetes that play the game at home to get a more personalized experience so that they learn more about consequences of their actions to their health to apply in their daily life."
Other:
Target Audience
As already specified, the target audience is people who have diabetes (more specifically older people) and want to know more about what consequences their actions have to their health.
Reflection
Design Challenges
Before the project started, I created some design challenges for myself. In this chapter I go over these design challenges and reflect on how I believe they turned out.
"Design a virtual opponent for an already existing game made for diabetes patients, so they can play against themselves and others in order to learn how to cope with their disease and to get a better idea of how others manage their lives with diabetes."
The original and most important design challenge came down to creating a virtual opponent system so people would be able to play against prerecorded opponents. Creating the system went quite smooth and before I knew it the basics were in place. The biggest problem however turned out to be the code structure. There were some reliability problems with the virtual opponents in certain situations and it was pretty much impossible to find the solutions. Because of this the full "bugless" implementation took way longer than expected which was unfortunate.
The implementation of GameBus went a lot better. GameBus was needed in order to make it possible for players to play against others instead of only themselves. I had a meeting with Vadym (GameBus software developer) and together we created a plan on how to do this. After that I managed to fully implement the system. The UI for this isn't fully done at the point of handing in this portfolio which is why the end product video doesn't contain this feature.
Overall I'm happy with the results of this design challenge. I believe the system works really well and fulfills it's purpose. After showing the results to Harm and Pieter and making my parents play the game, they all felt like the virtual opponent actions were quite clear to the player. Unfortunately I haven't been able to test it with actual diabetes patients which creates the situation where I can't validate if the virtual opponent would actually stimulate other behavior.
"Design new features for SugarVita to enable patients with diabetes that play the game to get a more personalized experience, so that they learn more about the consequences of certain actions to their health which they can apply in their real daily life"
This design challenge is a bit more vague and doesn't really have a true definition of done like the first design challenge. The purpose of this design challenge was simply put to improve the game with different features. I created the activity system which helps to easily add new activities. I've added a forest walk and a party for now which is an improvement, but it definitely needs some more activities for it to make a real impact on the game.
I'm not too happy about the outcome of this design challenge as I wasn't quite able to implement as many new features as I would've liked, but maybe my expectations of what I would be able to achieve in the time left were a bit too high. Once again I wasn't able to directly test the game with diabetes patients which makes it impossible to verify if they would learn more about consequences of their actions, but on the other hand, I talked a lot with Harm who's also an expert when it comes to the thought process from a lot of people with diabetes. He agreed with my assumptions that it would probably help, so I'll take that as a positive from this.
Self Reflection
I'm happy with all that I achieved this internship. I feel like working on a game like SugarVita that can help other people is a very nice thing to do. It does have it's downsides as there was no professional game developer I could learn from, but on the other I hand I was able to work together with some other professionals like Pieter and Harm.
I did a lot communication wise. Normally I'm not the one who takes the lead in communication, but this internship I wanted to change that (one of my personal goals). I'm very happy with how this went. It wasn't always easy to plan meetings at the right times as Pieter and Harm are both busy men, but with good communication it always worked out.
SugarVita already existed and because of that, I needed to work on already existing code. This was a new challenge for me as well and I find it to be a valuable experience.
I'm less happy about the last 3-4 weeks before the portfolio deadline. I had a lot of ideas for new features, but I was hesitant on working on them with so little time left. This was partly thanks to the link between SugarVita and GameBus which wasn't fully functional and I needed Vadym and Pieter for that. Thanks to this I didn't get a lot of work done in the final weeks. Next time I need to be less hesitant and just dare to start something new even with little time left, because it would have definitely been possible to add 1 or 2 more features in those final weeks if I set my mind to it.
In general, looking back at SugarVita before and after my internship, I can be proud of how much the game has improved game design wise. I'm also very happy about my improvement at taking the lead in communication instead of waiting for others to do so.
Sources
- Pieter van Gorp. (n.d.). TU/e. Retrieved 11 June 2022, from https://www.tue.nl/en/research/researchers/pieter-van-gorp/[1]