Sammy Schreier

Life Flashes By is a indie video game that pairs the DualSense controller’s features with an emotional narrative. The controller acts as a tool for you to connect with the main character, Lu and her headspace. It’s her 15th birthday and she is caught between her mother’s pressure to not follow traditions throwing a quinceanera and her family’s expectations to follow them. But when her Abuelita gifts her an old Polaroid camera, Lu discovers she can see a glimpse into the future. In her future she sees herself crying at the end of her own party. Determined to change her fate, she goes around her party interacting with guests and taking photos with them to see what future they have together. The controller enters here where it helps you experience Lu’s emotions with her. When her heart skips a beat you can feel the controller rumble. Taking photos makes you push through tension in the triggers just like the tension she feels in the room. Her inside thoughts are spoken out loud through the speakers.

The DualSense controller has many different features that are different from the standard controller. Three features I focused on in my game were vibrations, adaptive trigger buttons that get harder, and projected audio from the speakers. These are available for developers to integrate in their games including a list of other features however, most games are underutilizing them leaving them to be a gimmick. They are implemented into games as a response to players walking on textures with a vibration, adaptive triggers for shooting weapons, and audio effects for microinteractions. It used less in storytelling aside from a few moments in some games. Life Flashes By uses the potential of the controller’s features and pairs them to an emotional story to create interactive immersion.

Creating this game I wanted to connect an emotional narrative so that the features from the controller help the story shine. I was inspired by my own personal experience growing up in a Mexican American family that did not force many traditions on me which made me feel outcast from my Mexican side of the family. I started writing the story first to see that it resonated with people and got very positive feedback. With the story all written out, I went to Unreal Engine to build my game. I’ve never used the software before so Claude and Gemini helped teach me what aspects I needed to build out for my game. Prompting and refeeding the AI information became a hassle mid project so I created documentation of prompts and my blueprints with all my nodes to properly keep the AIs up to date in information. I also worked closely with two artists to create and refine assets for the game and a voice actor for the audio mechanic.

This resulted in a demo of my game. For time constraints not everything could be completed in time but the direction and script has been written out. Mid development however, I ran into an issue where I discovered Sony hard wired the DualSense controller to not be able to project audio without a PlayStation 5 developer kit. I attempted to create a two way speaker system that would project the dialogue through the controller and the rest of the audio through my laptop. Unreal Engine made it sound garbled even though I was able to get it to work. In the future I want to spend more time trying to get this solution to work or get my hands on a developer kit. The final demo shows the main gameplay section of the main character Lu, having received the camera going around and taking photos with her party guests. If further development is pushed after the grad show, it would mainly be to fix bugs and add cutscenes prior to the demo portion and after to the end.