Through the Amaze competition we got a chance to work with a number of experts on Autism to design and develop a shopping experience that could show how difficult mundane tasks can be for someone who is on the spectrum.

The experience is designed to ellicit similar anxiety and emotional responses in people who are not on the Autism spectrum to people who are heavily on the spectrum when they go shopping in a regular supermarket. Thus the people were designed to be slightly alien and unsettling, and the world becomes more harsh as your senses are bombarded. Additionally there are stimming exercises in the experience which can be used to help the player recover, and these exercises are derived from common exercises performed by people with Autism when they become overwhelmed.

My role in the deveopment of this project was as one of the gameplay programmers. In this case I was responsible for programming and fine tuning the player's hands to mostly follow the controllers (motor control gets worse as you become overwhelmed) as well as to pick up and put down or throw objects (as objects keep the momentum of the hand). This was developed before there were readily available tutorials and instructions on how to program hands in VR and before UE4 released their VR controls example level, so there was a lot of experiementation involved.