Total Warfare
Total Warfare is a game that simulates a real life battle royale mode that can be combined with laser tag. The player gets assigned one of two teams and has to capture zones to get points and have a spot to respawn once you die. After a few minutes a storm comes from all sides enclosing the players that comes closer over the time, effectively making the play area
smaller. When a player is inside the storm their team loses points, so they are always on the move. On their phone, the player can see a map of the venue, their and their team teammates location, every zones status, the score and occasionally the enemy players location.
The goal was to enhance the players experience at the venue and offer more game variety without replacing the offered activities there. The game is made to explore the possible applications of tracking systems and about designing fun gameplay using the players location.
Genre: AR mobile App
Year: 2021
Players: up to 100
Team size: 5
My part: Design, art
Goal: Making a mobile game using indoor location tracking at the location of Superpark Vuokatti.
Partners
MEGAZONE
The game was commissioned by Iiwari, a company that has an indoor real time location system. They want to expand their market and proof that their system can be used in the entertainment industry.
Throughout the project they supplied us with their hardware and established communication with the other partners.
SuperPark is a company that owns indoor activity parks that offer sportive activities for all ages. Vuokatti was chosen as the location where the game would take place, as Iiwari was already working together with them and had installed their hardware at the location.
Next to being a testing ground, we also worked with them to gather feedback and work with our target audience.
Megazone Vuokatti is situated inside the SuperPark and offers laser tag experiences for visitors.
Contact with them was established half way through the project and made us rethink the project to incorporate their hardware. Their hardware helped us overcome some challenges that the tracking had.
Design process
My main task during the project was game design. This included a lot of concepting, UX, level respectively game mode design, communicating our ideas to the client and overlooking the design process.
Before we could start concepting, research had to be done. Most importantly into what the limits but also the opportunities of Iiwaris tracking system were. There is a delay of up to three seconds that needed to be taken into consideration for the design. This heavily influenced the concepting, since we could not use player on player interactions like in the game Catch. Next to that, we also visited the SuperPark. As the park was not symmetrical we mapped the area and looked for interesting spots. We would later use this knowledge to define interesting play areas. Additionally, talking to the visitors and to the park supervisors gave us insight into how our target audience thinks and behaves. We also made desk research into competitors like Ingress or Pokemon Go.
After the research we had a clear vision of what the game should look like: A mobile game where players are brought together to participate in sporty activities that get enhanced by AR and tracking technology. I came up with multiple concepts for these activities and we decided to start with the most adaptable: Conquer, where teams have to capture zones to get points, whoever has more players in captures the zone.
We tested this game at the university first and narrowed down some design details, e.g. how to prevent a stalemate, since players can’t take each other out of the game. At the same time I worked on a concept video for our client that shows how a game could look like and several flowcharts for our programmer to get started.
When we were getting ready to put our finishing touches on Conquer, an opportunity presented itself. We got in contact with Megazone, a laser tag company situated inside the SuperPark. We talked with their franchise owner before and he was very interested about the project. Iiwari followed up on it and asked us if we could imagine including them and their laser tag in the game we were doing. With only two months time remaining it was a difficult decision, but in the end we decided to go along with it and redesigned the entire game. Now, we could actually include an elimination and respawning method. To save time, we narrowed the game down to only one game mode, Conquer, to which we added a mechanic of a shrinking play area that would eliminate players that stayed out too long. Lastly, we focused on player feedback and included vibration and sound, so that the players know what is happening in the meta game without looking at their phone. The last week was spent on porting the game to multiple devices and preparing a presentation for our clients.