Film School Simulator is an irreverent satire developed in VR as an interactive narrative depicting the life of a film school student. It was the first VR project produced by Emerson Independent Video.

Over 30 college students across various creative disciplines were eager to join the team to work on this project. As a co-producer, I was responsible for developing team policies and pipeline management, allocating project finances, and creating documents such as roadmaps, flowcharts, and task sheets.

As the lead writer and lead 2D artist, I was directly responsible for the work of two teams. I developed a large-scale direction for the project, including complex branching narrative structures and character design with consideration for the specific medium of stationary VR.

Unfortunately, nothing prepared the team for when COVID-19 broke out mid-way through our production timeline. Half of our team left the project and the other half could no longer meet in person. At the vote of our remaining team, my co-producers and I made the difficult choice to cancel the project as planned and developed a smaller scope version of the project remotely — a text-based version of our interactive narrative and a web-hosted demo with our assets that can be experienced in virtual reality.