Krishan Rajaratnam
2021 HEAR US Awardee
Krishan Rajaratnam is a programmer, narrative designer, and musician currently working on Mind over Manam (MoM) with his sister, Viji Rajaratnam, under the joint name Team Coconut. He is working on his MFA in Game Design at Tisch’s NYU Game Center, and holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago with significant coursework in linguistics. He is also working on the Oculus Launch Pad project Vernacular, a language learning platform in VR.
During his first year at the Game Center, Krishan worked on the two-player romantic sci-fi walking simulator “Together” which was featured in “Nina Freeman’s Top 10 Games of 2019.”
He has worked in a variety of fields and is always looking for interesting intersections. Currently, he is interested in ludo-narrative language-based information games and games that employ Natural Language Processing. Prior to working with games, he researched computational linguistics, Automatic Speech Recognition, and adversarial attacks on neural networks.
Project
Mind over Manam
If words could move you, where would they take you?
Mind over Manam is a story-rich multilingual puzzle-adventure video game about a fresh-off-the-boat Sri Lankan Tamil mother trying to find her daughter, and a whitewashed American daughter trying to find home. Explore a rich family history by visiting six distinct time periods, ranging from ancient palaces to intergalactic spaceships, where words have the concrete power to alter entire rooms. Search your memory for Tamil and English lines of dialogue or descriptions, and change objects by applying key words to them. Use context clues to recover a lost mother tongue, and connect an intergenerational chain of daughters through time. Grow your vocabulary, and your abilities, by translating the worlds around you.
But after all this interpretation, is anything lost along the way?
This game will be released with both a VR and flat keyboard-and-mouse version. Featuring original music and voice acting.
Please see https://team-coconut.itch.io/ for more information.