Game-On Bellevue  was an event in mid 2018 that focuses on getting people outside during the evening. The event will be held near city hall and will house a multitude of different mini-games for people to enjoy. The project was originally going to run September 2017, but has since been pushed back to 2018 to make sure the event is thoughtfully planned. My role on the team is to help design the mini-games, and make sure the games were playable and accessible for everyone.

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Early Project

The team originally consisted of DigiPen students who's goal was to create a game for an event called Alt.Ctrl.GDC. It was a competition in which teams create games using ulterior controller methods. We wanted to use RFID and NFC technology in some capacity. To explain what they are, RFID cards are the chips inside of things like staff cards that scan to allow people into buildings. With that in mind, designed a game experience in which players would explore the convention center gathering items. These items would be physical cards with RFID chips in them that the player could trade between other players. This was intended to promote players socializing with each other and meeting new people. The items would be used in dungeons at our booth. Players would come up to an Amazon Alexa and they would scan their cards in and try and group together to defeat enemy bosses. We never got much further after that since around early June we got word that the vice president of DigiPen was working on a project for the city of Bellevue and needed help.

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The Beginning of Bellevue

The project wanted to include RFID cards and exploration in some capacity, and since we had experience working on that, we were brought on to design and implement the game. We scrapped a lot of what we had already and re-formatted the design to be more in line with a quite simple game that was meant for all ages. We produced a quest system that tracked your progress using an RFID card that all players would receive. Players would walk around a few blocks in Bellevue and scan their cards on tablets to progress through the game. This would promote people exploring unfamiliar places in Bellevue and get people in stores they normally would not go into. Unfortunately, the representatives at the city of Bellevue decided to scale back the event to have a much smaller game space. They also wanted to make the game consist of mini-games and use RFID cards to track progress on there. So, we had to restart our project yet again.

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The Final Design

With the audience still being the same, we produced eight mini-games that encompassed a bunch of different kinds of activities. There are some games that use dexterity and others that are puzzles. We tried to relate all our mini-games to game development. For example, for one of our games we had people create paper airplanes and try and land them in a target area. We related that to how in Game Design, it takes a lot of iterations and playtesting to get something you are happy with. Also, all of the games would have a 3 star system, where depending on how well the player does, they get stars according to it. Their stars would be tracked in their player cards that contain the RFID chip in them. Players could cash in their stars to get prizes like food or other sponsored items. With the event happening in late September, we are working hard to get everything prepped for the event.

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What I Worked On

With the project and team changing so much, it got hard at times with morality and losing momentum, so one of the jobs I gave myself was to keep everyone motivated. I talked to everyone a lot and made sure they kept their heads up and to make sure the product we delivered was the best it could be.

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One of my other roles was to make sure that the audience was kept in mind at all times. When we switched our audience from being a group of people who played games to kids who don't understand games well, we needed to shift a lot. We couldn't take any assumptions of what the player would and wouldn't know, so we had to design an ultra simplistic game. 

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I also worked a lot on the User Interface

of the tablets making sure they were

quick enough that players spend at max

15 seconds at a tablet. Also I made sure

that the design of the tablets were clean

and easily understandable. We were able to playtest at DigiPen with around 100 players of all ages. The main feedback we got was that it was still a little hard to understand how the system worked as a whole but besides that the kids loved it. 

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When we switched to the mini-games, I worked on the design of the meta game of the project. We wanted there to be purpose to what everyone was doing. So I came up with the rewards with the 3 star system that would incentivise people to play more games. The rewards would consist of items provided to us by our sponsors and coupons for the food trucks. 

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I also helped with volunteer management. With having nine stations with two people at each station over a two day period, we needed 40-80 volunteers to help out at the event. I helped set up the training curriculum and the logistics of how and when everything would get done.