The Laurier Way

Synopsis

The Laurier Way is a series of five games created for Wilfrid Laurier University’s Fall 2020 Orientation Week. Due to the ongoing pandemic, orientation was moved to a completely online form and wanted a set of games to be made that could teach about the resources and expectations of Laurier. Each day of orientation one game was played in a designated hour time slot, that was connected by an overarching story about four famous guild leaders and a ghost named Splat.

While this was a group project we were each tasked with different needs of the project. My role was as a game design and document writer. I did the third game Escape-Keys which is an escape room style game that takes the player around to different key locations of the campuses to solve puzzles as a way to get back to the world from which they came from. This game was run through five Google Forms and facilitated by the players in small groups. I also helped to design and develop the fourth game Ghost Trap which is a mystery-solving game about finding evidence of Splat’s misdeeds, using Twine as the facilitation tool. For the other games in the series, I provided support with writing and prototyping but did not have a heavy influence on the outcome. Instead, I spent most of my time writing and editing the documents included in the file, such as the design document, history document, and the first, third, and fourths game rules sheets.