Welcome back to the IGT Lab weekly development blog for week 8!

Design Update

As we have discussed in the previous blog post, we decided bring in more real elements of the environment into our virtual world, to give the guests a grounded experience and better understanding of the context.

We have decided to go with New York City as our demo driving experience. As opposed to floating in the vast space environment, this abstracted environment allows guests to understand that it is a vehicle moving through a real location. The abstract style still gives the designers a degree of flexibility in deciding what elements will be more pronounced than others, and the ability to customize them easily.

This opens up to additional content that we can introduce over time, such as buildings being colored in over time, introducing new buildings to be placed in the virtual environment, and etc.

Our designers have also worked on the animation for the beat objects, and have been collaborating with our engineers to integrate them into the Isotope scene. We have yet to playtest the efficacy of the animation path that you can see above. The blue and green elements are for the front two passengers, and the purple and yellow for the rear two passengers. Whether this is clear for the passengers will have to be tested.

Hardware Update

There aren’t a lot of hardware update from this week, apart from the new branding we were able to mount on to the rig. Our clients were pleased!

Client Meeting

During our meeting, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback and insight:

• Start thinking about how to block out the light in the platform for a better sense of space and immersion.
• Think about the spirit of the experience; what are we trying to induce from the players through the experience?
• Go bold, go beyond. Consider different modes (ie. meditation mode, party mode…). Perhaps these can be affected by external factors (ie. weather, traffic).
• This experience can become a solid platform on top of which we can continuously add features, gameplay, environments, and etc. A playground!
• Think about the temporal nature of these experiences.
  • Most of the time, the car is not being used.
  • Do players leave traces behind? How does that affect future gameplay? 
  • Think also about car sharing culture. Often times car-sharing experience is ruined due to things people leave behind. How can this experience augment that into a social game that evolves over time?
• TYP.1 Seat by Icon could potentially be delivered to CMU. This would be awesome for our project!

Looking ahead

Half of our team will be gone for GDC. Our plan for next week therefore is to focus on integrating all the assets that our designers have already created, into the Isotope scene for playtesting. We will begin working on UI elements of our game experience as well.

Given that we have all the functionality albeit in different branches, we should still be able to achieve our first playtest with halved manpower.

Thank you for reading, and we’ll be back next week with more updates!