Immersive Interactive : Gesture Recognition Games

ON-SITE ACTIVATION

As part of our creative campaigns for Studio City Resort & Casino in Macau, we were tasked to create interactive kinect games hooked up to a twenty foot screen at a crossroads on-site that had heavy traffic. Our challenge was to create a game based that was simple enough to pick up, but fun enough to want to play over and over again. We built two games across two campaigns, Space Invaders and Anime at Studio City.

My role was to develop the creative gameplay concept & look/feel, design the game mechanics , as well as creating the vinyl floor sticker ‘set design’.

AGENCY Ogilvy – YEAR 2019 – DURATION 6 MONTHS – LOCATION MACAU

TEAM Manolis Perrakis - Tech Lead, Sherin Siew - Digital Art Director, Soenar Santoso - Art Director, Shadow Factory - Game Development

ROLE UI + UX DESIGN, DIGITAL PRODUCTION, CREATIVE DIRECTION

CONCEPT

Immerse yourself in another world - in a minute or less.

Digital gaming experiences for high foot traffic zones.

We created a huge, immersive digital game experience that would easily capture an audience in a casino densely packed with other attractions.

Maximizing crowd engagement through intuitive gameplay.

Recognizing the breadth of our audience, we designed the game to be as intuitive and simple as possible, but with a novel enough experience that the passer-by user would want to play it over and over again.

Screen Shot 2020-02-03 at 5.54.51 PM.png — FUN AND GAMES!

Above all, we wanted to create super fun, easy to play games. Working off of our art direction and game UX, we collaborated with the amazing team at Shadow Factory, who built the game on Unity. We set it up on an Xbox Kinect hooked up to a massive 42 sq. m LED display wall on-site.

Challenge

Create a kinect game based on a campaign theme, to be played on a huge 42 sq. m LED video wall in a high-traffic area of the Casino’s main floor.

Insight

Everything in this movie studio themed Casino is vying for your attention. How can we make sure passers-by will choose to interact with this immersive digital game piece ?

Solution

We designed games with these core principle in mind:

Remove barriers to entry by making the game “fool-proof”, i.e as intuitive as possible.

Create a gameplay that was fun enough for repeated engagement.
Prioritise details in world-building to capitalise on the immersive feeling of playing on a huge screen.

Process

DISCOVERY

Design for site-specific experience.

IMG_5737)edited.png — Site visits / people-watching.

When we visited the site to gather measurements and tech specs, we used it as an observation opportunity to decide a number of factors, such as the scale of the game visuals, the size of the gameplay area, the Kinect sensor range.

VISUAL DEVELOPMENT

Concept & art direction.

Screen Shot 2020-02-03 at 6.07.33 PM.png

Anime game concept board

The protagonist begins by flying over a traditional, low-lying Edo-period samurai village. As it flies towards the final boss, the landscape urbanizes into a towering, cyberpunk neo-Tokyo jungle.

GAME UX DEVELOPMENT

Interactive worlds.

UX design goals:

Play the game using the simplest possible gesture controls to minimise confusion.
Minimize the amount of time needed for onboarding.
Make sure the UX mirrors the ‘narrative’ UX of driving a mecha robot.
Immerse the user into the ‘universe’ of the overarching Anime campaign.
Fun !!!

Stepping into another universe.

The game concept of the Anime game was inspired by the anime genre of ‘Isekai’ (異世界) which literally translates to ‘Different World’, where the protagonist enters a parallel, fantasy universe. The central game mechanics thus required the player to literally become and control the protagonist. We created a game flow that also used bespoke animation to contextualize and immerse the player into the game’s universe.