HELL's kitchen

You are a firefighter and you are having your first fire. Instead of putting out the fire from the bucket, you might have more serious jobs to do.

ROLE: Game Designer, 3D Artist

TEAM: 4 Members- 1 artist, 2 programmers, 1 sound designer

DURATION: 2 Weeks

PLATFORM: Oculus Touch

CLIENT: Building Virtual Worlds class at CMU's ETC

TOOLS: Unity, Maya, Photoshop, Quixel Suite

design goal: 

To provide a short narrative firefighting experience to the guest.

contribution to the project:

1. Created all the art assets on the project.

2. Worked out a spine of the story to reduce the narrative complexity of the game.

prototyping:

Our core mechanic was using the bucket and the hose to extinguish the fire.

Design Challenges

Narrative scope:

PROBLEM:

The initial story of the game had as lot of complexity and it was becoming time consuming to deliver that narrative in a short amount of experience.

SOLUTION:

We decided to build just the spine of our story first. We took out all the backstories and turned the experience into a simple sequence of events.

LEARNINGS:

1. Iterating on the story is as important as iterating on the game itself. Start with the spine of the story then build on it. Beat mapping the story is really helpful.

feeling of actual fire:

PROBLEM:

After adding virtual fire, the guests complained of the experience not feeling authentic.

SOLUTION:

We added a space heater to the experience which would be on and near the player when they go through the experience. We also made the player wear an actual firefighting suit.

control scheme:

PROBLEM:

Our experience had a lot of mechanics- picking and dropping objects, holding the hose for shooting water and moving the bucket around. Because of the availability of several inputs in the Oculus Touch controllers, we gave each mechanic a different input. Hence it was difficult for the players to learn the controls.

SOLUTION:

We mapped the holding, picking and dropping of objects to the trigger and moving the bucket one of the joysticks. This made the controls intuitive and juicy (less does more).