About the project…

Nystagmus is an eye movement pathology which effects at least 1 in 1,000 people, and is the most common form of visual impairment among school aged children. The condition gives those inflicted involuntary oscillation of the eyes which are often initiated by a slow drift away from fixation. As a result visual acuity is effected, and those suffering from it are also often slow to see patterns and details especially. Although there are ways to measure the slow to see phenomenon, the test practices are often bulky, time consuming, difficult to use, and often times fail at measuring how slow a person is to see. As a result Nucleolus has collaborated with the University of Southampton and Gift of Sight to produce a set of games that test and give data on how quickly children with Nystagmus are capable of spotting objects and forming new ones in a way to test the speed of their eyesight.


My role for this project.

The team were tasked with creating a set of three games that would require pattern recognition and object spotting, and were divided into small teams to produce them. I was in charge of designing gameplay and creating the assets needed for one of these three games. After initial research into Nystagmus and spot-the-difference type games, I proceeded to design a game which would have players find hidden objects generated amongst a 3D scene. After liaising with the team, we created an overarching theme and narrative connecting the three games of a burger truck owner selling drinks and burgers (two of the three minigames) who comes home and must tidy the house after a long days work (the third hidden objects game); the last idea being the one I proposed and worked on. By making the game 3D we could change lighting to test to see how much darkness impacted the time it would take players to find the hidden objects; additionally a 3D game allowed borderline endless test levels as the objects would never spawn in the same place every time. In total, besides the background scene I modelled and textured, I also created 8 objects that could be hidden randomly in the scene. Below you will see screenshots of gameplay for the game I created, as long as a video of one of the early test builds, created prior to all assets being polished and finalised.

Test Build Gameplay

The project is still in development as of March 2025, although we have started to conduct tests with the help of ophthalmologists and orthoptists from the Southampton General Hospital Eye Unit.