The Jurassic World is a rapid prototype game we designed for round one of the Building Virtual Worlds class at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. For round 1 all of the teams are given the starting idea of “you the guest help character A, who is afraid of character B” and must design there experience around that. Our experience also had to be designed for use with the HTC VIVE.
We started off by brainstorming lots of different ideas and then picked several to try and develop further. Eventually none of those initial ideas panned out but rather we took the elements of a lot of those ideas that we liked and tried brainstorming on what kind of story they could be used to tell best. Eventually we landed on a dinosaur themed experience and during our first iteration we had the guest riding on the back of a Jeep as a dinosaur chased you. We eventually landed on the idea of having the guest trapped in a watch tower because it was a great way to use the story to keep the guest in the ten foot by ten foot VIVE play area.
The challenge we faced with our design was being able to have guests to feel like they really needed to protect the little girl and themselves. To achieve this we needed to guests to actually feel some level of fear towards the dinosaur. This meant that we needed a very strong story, a realistic art style and an overall highly immersive. In the end we were able to accomplish our design goals and even had our world selected for the annual ETC festival
Preparing for FestivalÂ
For Festival we wanted to continue the idea of having our experience be highly immersive. So we came up with the idea of theming the room we were assigned to be as if you were actually in The Jurassic World. We expanded this idea by building a giant ten foot by ten foot dinosaur cage which is where people actually played our game and to get into the dinosaur cage we constructed giant gates and pillars that guests would pass through.
Festival
To add to the immersion I theatrically lit the space by using 4 Source four 70 degree units with jungle leaf breakups. Two Arri 650’s and two Arri 300’s which I used to light the space inside the dinosaur cage in a midnight blue. Two RGB LED up-lights on the front of the fake stone facade and two fake flame pots on top of the pillars to simulate torches, and several Par 16 units to highlight the fake trees.
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