PreviewLabs

Kimberly – Kim – Hieftje, PhD, just finished the most important project of her career: a video game about the loss of her son and how she processed this. To bring Year of the Cicadas to life, she contracted PreviewLabs for the development of the VR game in Unity.

In 2004, Kim was processing the loss of her six-year-old son Cody. He died of a congenital heart disease. His death came quite sudden. Despite her grief, the world kept moving forward. Winter turned into spring, even though this did not seem to fit the pain she felt at the time.

Brood X Cicadas

As she was processing this, visiting Cody’s grave regularly, the Brood X cicadas emerged. Their deafening song once again veiling the world in an eerie mood that suited Kim’s feelings better.

The Brood X cicadas emerge only once every 17 years to look for a suitable mating partner. In this process they make a loud ringing sound that drowns out nearly every other sound. A couple of years ago, they re-emerged once again. To Kim, this came as a signal that it was time to tell her story.

Interactive VR Experience

Year of the Cicadas is a virtual reality (VR) game that takes you through a series of scenes that play a significant role in Kim’s story. As the player interacts with the scene, she tells her story through voice-over. For example: in one scene the player gets to decorate a Christmas tree with ornaments that Cody’s grandmother gifted every year. Kim explains the significance of these ornaments and the impact of her loss on the Holiday season as the player hangs up these ornaments.

This game is more than just a way for Kim to tell her story. Year of the Cicadas is her way of making it easier for people to talk about grief. She feels like a lot of people do not know how to talk to someone who has suffered a great loss in their life. In her own experience she often gets responses that are tone-deaf or awkward.

Building a Team

With this goal in mind, Kim gathered the funds to make the game a reality. She applied for the Unity For Humanity grant and allocated a part of the budget at XR Peds toward it. Kim is one of the co-founders of the XR Peds lab at Yale University and loved working with this team on this emotionally ambitious project. In addition to this team, she hired an artist, Melle Bartl from Flat Head Studios, and a composer for the soundtrack: Dr. Andrew Schartmann from the New England Conservatory in Boston. Gene Kritsky, PhD joined the team as an expert on periodical Cicadas. Asher Marks, MD, worked alongside Kim as a co-producer.

Kim is our founder Bernard’s wife, which led to some collaborative projects between PreviewLabs and XR Peds in the past. Together, we worked on prototypes like Invite Only VR – a game about vaping prevention – and Investidate – a game about making healthy dating decisions. These past experiences led to PreviewLabs being contracted for the full development of Year of Cicadas.

Iterative Development at PreviewLabs

Our company is most known for prototypes and technical proofs of concept built with video game technology. On the surface, Year of the Cicadas seems like a different kind of project than what PreviewLabs is known for. With Year of the Cicadas, we worked on a full game release, which goes beyond what a regular prototype aims to achieve. There’s more testing involved, for example. Also the final product requires a fully polished feel compared to the functional look and feel of a prototype. Our approach did not change though. Through iterative steps, we approached this release with the same development philosophy.

To facilitate this broader scope and to gear up towards more iterative development projects in the future, we adapted our team internationally to work on this type of project. This included hiring some extra developers in Canada.

What Iterative Development Looks Like

PreviewLab stuck with an iterative approach to the development. The team created a rough version of each scene in the game with placeholder assets. This way, the artist could go in and see what was required for each individual scene and tailor her creations to that context. Based on this, each scene could be optimized iteratively.

As Bernard explains in the video above, the development of Year of the Cicadas started with the prototypes of two scenes. One was the graveyard scene in which the player visits Cody’s grave. The second is a scene in which you get to hang ornaments dedicated to Cody in a Christmas tree. We started with a primitive version of these scenes first and optimised from there with an artist. We repeated this process for every scene that we added to the game.

How the Game Plays

The gameplay of Year of the Cicadas is fairly straightforward. The player stands in one location in a scene and interacts with their environment by simply pointing toward something and clicking. There is only one button needed to interact with the entire game. In this regard, Year of the Cicadas is akin to a point-and-click adventure game more than anything else.

This level of simplicity in the gameplay makes it easier for players to interact with the game. However, it poses a challenge from a design and development standpoint, since every interaction has to be straightforward and it has to be clear to the player what they can and cannot do.

Sum of Its Parts

It is obvious that Year of the Cicadas is a special project. The game walks you through very emotional moments in the life of Kim and it is important for PreviewLabs to be respectful of the story she wants to tell. At the same time, the development team was able to provide constructive feedback on what does and does not work in a video game context.

For Kim, it was this input that will make the end result more than simply her game. Everyone was able to add to the project and that makes Year of the Cicadas all the more special to her.

Looking For Support to Build Your Game?

Year of the Cicadas will be the first full game release by PreviewLabs. As we expand our horizons beyond rapid prototyping, feel free to reach out and see how we can make your game idea a reality. As for Year of the Cicadas: the game will be available soon via the Meta Store.