Internship in the Afterlife — Namrata Shajwani

XR & Immersive · 2024

Internship in the
Afterlife

Visual Design Narrative Design VR Experience Unity 3D XR Game Design

Role

XR Designer &
Narrative Lead

Built with

Unity 3D · Blender
Adobe Suite · Gemini AI

Play

Play on itch.io →

The Project

You're dead. And your fate depends on a language you've never seen before.

Internship in the Afterlife is a VR language game about empathy. You arrive at the entry booth of the afterlife — and here, your linguistic ability determines whether you ascend or descend.

Players are briefly shown a foreign word in English, Hindi, or Mandarin, then must reconstruct it from memory using floating syllables. Get it right and you move forward. Get it wrong — you're fired, straight to hell.

The game was born from a real observation: the disorientation and high-stakes pressure that immigrants, international students, and travellers feel when navigating an unfamiliar language. By placing players inside that feeling, the experience builds genuine empathy rather than just awareness.

Demo Reel

Visual Design

The promotional posters and in-game screens were created using AI-generated imagery via Gemini with custom-designed typographic overlays — a deliberate blend of generated environment and crafted identity.

Final promotional poster — heaven entry sequence

AI-generated environment (Gemini) · Typography by Namrata Shajwani

In-game failure state — "You are fired!"

AI-generated environment (Gemini) · Typography by Namrata Shajwani

Iterations

Muted grey — exploring neutral atmospheres

Exploring depth using different tones

Warm colour iteration by intoducing red + blue split to echo the idea of heaven and hell. Final typographic direction included more vivid visuals

Stills from Gameplay

The game begins when one wears the grabbable identity card, giving the player agency and interactivity from the first moment.

At 'the booth', souls from different backgrounds arrive. The player has a few seconds to visually register the name before it disappears. They need to reform that name from memory.

Success proceeds to new names with audio, visual, and haptic feedback. Failure triggers a restart.

Playtesting

The game was playtested through multiple rounds of user testing, with feedback about complexity, timing, and haptic feedback. The final version was exhibited publicly, where players across different linguistic and cultural backgrounds engaged with the experience.

Players at the public showcase — Meta Quest headsets

Live gameplay interaction during the public demo

Designed and developed in collaboration with Komi (Jingren Ma) and Tomme Denney

Let's talk

Good work starts
with a good conversation.

Let's get coffee!