Welcome to week 5! We are now in full development phase as we prepare for our halves presentations.
This week we were able to compile our ideas and put forth a complete, coherent narrative experience detailing exactly what the guests would be doing in the room. This was largely thanks to our knowledge from prior prototyping experience, and also from discussing our project with third-party vendors such as Vayu Technology and Nextiles.
Meeting with Nextiles
In our follow-up meeting with George from Nextiles,
Narrative Setting:
Earth in 2150. A catastrophic event wiped out much of humanity’s achievements on Earth. There are a few surviving colonies on different planets, including the home of the guests, Enceladus. They now face an energy crisis where a specific type of fuel rods are required to power their civilization. The power rods were only manufactured on Earth before the planet was wiped, and guests must now retrieve them from Earth.
Earth is now devoid of atmosphere, which exposes itself to massive amounts of radiation from the Sun. The fuel rods can only be located by radiation however, and therefore guests must wait until night time to be able to pinpoint their exact locations. The lack of light and sandstorms make it impossible to navigate at nighttime. This places the guests on a loop; pin the locations of the fuel rod at nighttime, and navigate towards it at daytime.
The fuel rods can be harvested from inside the vehicle through remote gesture control. The harvested fuel rods are loaded in the cargo bay, where it must be continuously maintained. The volatile nature of the fuel rods must be stabilized, which can be done through remote gesture control within the vehicle. Leak detection system alerts the guests with audio/visual feedback, and the thermal camera distributed to the guests can then detect the hotspots within the vehicle. The guest can then approach the corresponding compartment, use remote gesture to stabilize the cargo.
Cargo stabilization requires water to constantly cool down the temperature, but the same water is also used to cool the vehicle itself. The guest therefore must carefully balance the resource usage without using more than needed to prevent the vehicle from being stranded on barren Earth.
Game Loop:
Virtual World – Guest 1 – Pilot/Harvester
The Pilot switches to nighttime. (hand gesture control)
The Pilot locates fuel rods through tactile vest feedback.
The Pilot controls the vehicle to face the fuel rod (arm gesture control, nextiles)
The Pilot switches to daytime (hand gesture control)
The Pilot drives the vehicle towards the fuel rod (arm gesture control, nextiles)
The Pilot repeats this step until they arrive at the fuel rod
The Pilot loads the fuel rod through remote gesture control (hand gesture control, eg. like pulling from you)
The Pilot repeats until 3 fuel rods have been loaded
Physical World – Guest 2 – Engineer/Maintenance
The Engineer manages water usage
The Engineer diverts water to cool down vehicle during daytime (flex left arm emg sensor, cools down the vehicle )
The Engineer notices potential leakage alerts from loaded fuel rods (audio/sound)
The Engineer locates overheating fuel rods through thermal camera (thermal camera detect heat pad)
The Engineer uses remote hand gesture to divert water from vehicle to corresponding cargo bay to cool down fuel rod (flex right arm to cool cargo)
(Compress gesture to stabilize the cargo)
The Engineer repeats this loop until all 3 fuel rods have been loaded
We are currently looking into developing a 2-player experience.
Now that we have formally entered our development phase, we are now utilizing Jira Software to better organize our sprints and keep track of our workload and progress.
