“One Day” visual novel game

CampusImpact

“One Day” visual novel game

Deepening empathy through a visual novel experience

CampusImpact (CI) is a charity supporting disadvantaged youth and their families. HOL strategised a visual novel game, One Day, to raise awareness of disadvantaged youth. The game was also aimed at encouraging donations towards CI’s Sunshine After the Rain campaign.

What we did

Stakeholder research
Experience strategy
Content strategy
Gamification strategy
App development
Digital storytelling
UIUX mapping and design
Augmented reality
Project management

Challenges

The practice of empathy can be a challenge for anyone, as it’s not easy for them to set aside their tendency to judge and seek to understand another person’s perspective, needs and feelings. To bridge the gap between potential donors and beneficiaries, we needed to create more awareness of the challenges that the beneficiaries face.

Insights and strategy

Role-playing enhances empathy, which was essential to close the gap between potential donors and beneficiaries. A visual novel game would be an effective way for potential donors to step into beneficiaries’ reality. It is also a form of storytelling popular with Gen Z and hence CI’s beneficiaries, our secondary audience.

Players could role-play beneficiaries and make decisions around their challenges. Through this creative experience, players would gain greater empathy for the beneficiaries and be nudged to lend a hand.

Solutions

Empathy-led experience

In view of the short project time frame (only 4 weeks so the launch coincided with the festive season when donors were more generous), the team interviewed only CI’s director and staff members who understood the beneficiaries and their families intimately. With their inputs, and research drawn from The Char Kway Teow Legacy project, the team could still build an empathy-driven product.

We developed and designed a visual novel game, One Day, in which players undergo and experience a day in the life of a beneficiary. We conceptualised the game’s storyline around the difficult decisions that a beneficiary might have to make. The outcome of the game would change according to these decisions.

Catering to different user types

We were mindful that donating financially might not be possible for some players, and pushing for donations might even discourage such action. Therefore, we crafted a few possible pathways for a player to engage with CampusImpact — donate, volunteer, contact or simply reflect on their personal takeaways from One Day — to cater to each player’s own natural preference.

Impact

“Through the One Day visual novel app, the HOL team not only sought to raise funds for CampusImpact but also took on the more difficult task of raising awareness and changing attitudes of the public, who walked in the shoes of children from lower-income families for one day. The team had a tight deadline and worked with passion and professionalism, making several revisions after consulting with CampusImpact’s programme executives and counsellors. They even composed original music for the visual novel. What was more precious was the lesson many young people learnt – that although our choices are limited, we can try again and again and hopefully end up with a good ending.”

Ms Elsya Chen
Executive Director
CampusImpact