1: What's your background in making games?

I am a postgraduate interactive and digital media researcher who works and publishes mainly in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Mixed Reality and Games.

3: How did you come up with the concept?

We wanted to weave meaning with our selection of scents that would be featured in the game and so we started to look at possible cultural links to craft the game narrative. In the end, we based it around a traditional horror folklore of Southeast Asia that has a complementary tie-in with a specific fruit (banana).

4: What development tools did you use?

Tainted consists of two main modules: 1) the game is developed on Unity (https://unity3d.com/unity) and it communicates with the smell-emitting module over a USB connection. The physical smell-emitting module, which has four vials that contain different scents, is controlled by an Arduino Pro Mini (https://www.arduino.cc). Each vial has an ultrasonic diffuser and an attached cotton stick that draws the liquid scent up to the diffuser unit for scent dissipation. An RGB Light Emitting Diode (LED) is also attached to the bottom of each vial to provide color feedback to the player.

5: What were the significant changes between the presented games and games you developed before?

This is the first time that we tried to design a game that explicitly exploits the sense of smell as a game feedback mechanism, and that the selection of one of the key scents was solely inspired by the game narrative (story).

6: What is your goal as a game developer?

Intrigue the senses to engage the player

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