After a shaky round three, I was ready to reset and give it my all in this round. I had received some great feedback from the faculty and my peers on how I could improve as a teammate and I was ready to put that into to good use. Like the previous round, we had no idea what the theme was going to be or what our platform was.

It's Story time

For the fourth round of BVW, the assignment prompt was to build an experience for the guests with a deep and engaging story in mind in a time span of two weeks. My team and I chose the makey-makey sensor kit as our hardware platform for the experience.

I was on a team with two artists and a sound designer. My role on the project was that of a programmer. As the sole programmer on the project, I was responsible for implementing everything, from the movement of the car to the implementation of all the obstacles in the Unity game engine. I also helped my teammates in building the physical drivers console that we had as a prop for our game.

We started the assignment by finding stories that we could relate to and the kind of story we wanted to tell. We decided that we wanted to tell a story where the guest is on the edge at all times. Once we received our platform assignment, we wanted to use its potential to the fullest. Our initial idea was to make a Zombie survival game, where you are driving a car and must survive the onslaught of Zombies, but this idea had very few story elements. We then decided to theme this in the candy world and you are escaping from the candy police of some sort. The story in the game was that you were a getaway driver for a heist that was being conducted by the gingerbread people in Candy Land to steal chocolate chips. The guests goal was to drive a car prop that we made. The car prop had a rotary encoder and a makey-makey that gave us additional input. The guest had to drive away from Candy Land and avoid obstacles to reach the bread village.

The wheels fall apart

From the get-go on this project we knew we had an uphill battle since we had chosen to create a driving game which are notoriously hard to make and balance. As the programmer on the project, I was in charge of making the car work in game in such a way that it felt like a real car. With the help of one of the artists, Alan, I came up with a way in which we could use the Makey-Makey to make a steering wheel, but one of our instructors suggested that we use a Rotary Encoder as that would provide a much smoother feedback to the guests. I rapidly tested the Rotary Encoder and found out how to use its Input in Unity and how to record the Rotary Input. I kept making changes and fine tuning it right up until the final submission.

Another major challenge for us was creating an engaging Level Design that tied in well with the story. For the first iteration, we had levels generating in any side of the player and as the player got further away from it would destroy itself. This allowed the player to explore the area in any direction they pleased. But, this was turning out to be hard as the input provided by the rotary encoder device was nowhere near as accurate as we wanted it to be. We received feedback that the driving did not feel right and it was very hard to control the vehicle. We also had raining candy monsters as well but those too felt out of place. One of the best things about the first iteration that we had to remove because it did not fit in the story was the fact that we were using actual candy to connect the Makey-Makey cables and using them as the prompt that you need to hot wire the car and then diffuse a bomb.

After the first iteration, we received feedback from our instructors that the story was very weak and that the car did not drive well. we spent the rest of the week tuning the car physics and finally got it to respond well. We also removed the ability for you to turn around the level, but added obstacles in your way to make it harder for you. We also finished building the prop that added some in-world immersion to the experience.

After the final iteration, we received feedback that the story was even weaker than at the halfway stage and that we had spent too much time focusing on the driving mechanic that still did not feel great. The faculty also lamented the fact that we had chosen to get rid of the interactions with the real candy as that was the most immersive part of the whole experience.

Round Complete

Our goal with this project was to create a simple and linear story where the guest is first introduced to their role as the getaway driver and throughout the game, that role is enforced with various obstacles and the physical actors that are with the guest in the car. A poorly implemented game mechanic had made a weak story even weaker and we could have spent a little more time working on the story.