OVERVIEW
Summit was designed to embed proven psychological wellness interventions within an immersive world where story, curiosity, wonder, and play could drive engagement and adherence. By the time I was brought in, the inherited prototype had already spent roughly a year in development with little meaningful progress. It was stalled by uncanny characters, derivative storytelling, and an experience structure that worked against immersion. What the project needed was not a surface-level redesign, but a complete creative reset.
ROLE & SCOPE
I reset the project’s direction by ending our engagement with the external developers and building an in-house studio from the ground up. I then built and led a small team of artists while driving Summit’s creative redevelopment, reshaping its world, characters, and experience design into a cohesive immersive product.
Worldbuilding: Defining the story, setting, environmental logic, and spatial tone of the world.
Character Design: Replacing the inherited cast with a new character approach that supported emotional accessibility and user connection.
Concept Art: Serving as the project’s sole concept artist, defining everything from large-scale environments to small-world details.
Experience Design: As the project’s only designer, laying out levels and translating therapeutic interventions into VR-native, game-embedded experiences.
REBUILDING THE HUMAN CONNECTION
Replacing uncanny characters with an emotionally supportive cast
The inherited experience relied on human-like characters that fell into the uncanny valley, creating discomfort where trust and emotional safety were essential. In close proximity, they felt more threatening than supportive, weakening both the therapeutic tone and the user’s connection to the world.
The redesign abandoned realism entirely. A new character language was developed that was smaller in scale, more approachable, and more emotionally legible, helping counter the intimidation of the original cast while better suiting the user’s seated perspective. Their size made them feel less imposing and easier to connect with, allowing the characters to support the experience rather than unsettle it. This shift opened the door to a broader rethinking of story, mood, and user motivation, helping Summit become a world that felt welcoming, coherent, and worth returning to.
BUILDING A WORLD WORTH ENTERING
Replacing fragmentation with atmosphere, logic, and place
The inherited experience felt like a series of disconnected activities rather than a cohesive world. What it lacked was not just visual continuity, but a sense of environmental logic, narrative connection, and emotional tone strong enough to make the experience feel whole.
The redesign treated worldbuilding as the foundation of immersion. Story, setting, characters, architecture, vegetation, and spatial rhythm were developed as parts of a single system, allowing each space to feel connected to a larger place rather than isolated within it.
The result was a world that felt more coherent, atmospheric, and worth exploring. Moving through Summit became a way of understanding the environment itself, not just progressing from one activity to the next.
EMBEDDING INTERVENTIONS INTO THE WORLD
Reworking therapeutic mechanics as natural parts of play
One early intervention, a cognitive bias modification exercise, was originally structured like a traditional word search with a spoken tutorial, unique button mechanics, and a reliance on precise controller input. The result felt cognitively heavy and poorly suited to VR, especially for first-time users.
The redesign shifted the exercise from instruction to discovery. Positive English words were replaced with simple symbolic faces, allowing the mechanic to feel native to the world rather than imposed on it. Explicit directions were removed, and the interaction was embedded directly into the environment itself.
Users encounter flowers whose faces detach and drift toward them. Their movement and interaction options are intentionally constrained, gently steering them into contact with the floating faces. Touching a happy face triggers positive audio and visual feedback as it is collected into a basket. Interacting with a negative or neutral face elicits no response. After ten happy faces are gathered, a celebration unfolds and the next part of the experience is unlocked.
In another intervention, users wore a belt that tracked chest expansion, turning breath into a measurable input inside VR. In the inherited experience, that input was handled through voiced sequences that told users when to breathe in and out. While functional, the system kept the intervention external to the world and made repeated use feel more instructional than immersive. The goal of the redesign was to make guided breathing immediately recognizable, intuitive, and scalable without constant narration.
To achieve this, I created breathing stones: blue glowing discs that act as a power source for devices ranging from doors to boats. Their expanding and contracting glow showed users exactly what rhythm to follow, while allowing them to begin at their own pace. In doing so, they turned guided breathing into a visual language embedded directly into the world itself.
In both cases, the goal was the same: to move therapeutic intervention out of explicit instruction and into the logic of the world. By embedding these exercises into play, feedback, and environmental response, Summit turned them into natural parts of its systems, story, and progression rather than tasks layered on top of the experience.
Breathing stones embedded throughout the world
Some details were meant to be discovered, not announced. This flower used a gaze-based trigger to reward sustained attention, responding with a friendly wave only after the user truly noticed it.
RESPECTING PLAYER AGENCY
Guiding attention without controlling discovery
Scene layouts were redesigned around what users needed to experience in the moment versus what could be discovered later. Critical moments were reinforced through audio and visual cues, progression-essential activities were gated and guided by the world's inhabitants, and optional content used subtle gaze-based triggers to reward curiosity and attention. Details were layered so repeat playthroughs could reveal more than the first.
Underneath those decisions was a disciplined approach to spatial design. Before detailed modeling began, key moments and objects were blocked out with simple geometric forms to establish scale, sightlines, and pacing. This ensured that attention and pacing were shaped intentionally rather than accidentally
The result was an experience in which the user became part of the design system itself, not just an observer moving through the world, but an active element in how it was revealed and understood.
SIMPLIFYING CONTROL FOR IMMERSION
Reducing cognitive load through consistency and restraint
Three principles guided the interaction design:
1. Consistency over complexity: No special cases. A button always did the same thing. By eliminating shifting behaviors and hidden rules, the control scheme stayed predictable and learnable, reducing cognitive load so users could focus on the experience rather than the interface.
2. Accessibility first: Interaction design was shaped by extensive testing with first-time and non-technical VR users across multiple age groups. Through playtesting, surveys, direct observation, and even a field trip with a group of first-time seniors to a VR arcade, it became clear that simplicity and consistency mattered more than feature depth. The system was built to minimize friction, helping users stay present instead of thinking about how to operate the controls.
3. Maximize immersion: Immersion depended on removing gamified visual clutter. There was no HUD. Inventory lived in the user’s hands, tools were embedded into gloves, and controller beams were replaced with subtle object highlighting. The result was a control scheme that felt consistent, learnable, and quietly supportive.
Hand-based tools and inventory
OUTCOME
Summit became the foundation for our internal studio and a proof point for how careful immersive design could support psychological intervention in ways that feel human, safe, and emotionally grounded.
What began as a struggling prototype became an experiential framework that shaped everything that followed.