Regatta

Regatta was a 3 week long project for the Building Virtual Worlds class at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technologies Center. The Game was built by a 4 man team consisting of Jiang "Johnson" Yunan (programmer), Alejandra Soto (sound designer), Roy Koganti (Programmer), and Dale Wones (artist).

The concept of the game was that we were building with the BVW festival in mind, which meant that you needed to a large scale flashy game, that you could get as many people through the experience in a short (4 hour) time frame. 

From that basic idea we ended going through a list of game concepts that we could have at least 2 or more people experience at a time, that was fun to watch, and could be large scale. We also wanted the game to be both competitive and cooperative at the same time. After some debate, we decided to go with the idea of sailing, as it would be something that most people have not done themselves before, but understand the basic concept of how it works. 

We then started to design around the idea of sailing. in the gallery to the left you can see some early control systems that I design to be made into props later in the
process. We really want the player to get the feel of using ropes and rigging to
work the ship when we started the design process. I later found out that this would
become slightly too much for our scope on the project. We then decided to keep
the basics of the props and throw out the extras.

So from starting from the basics of the prop sail and steering, what would soon just become a basic rudder system, we started to build the game using 300 degree rotation Phidgets sensors I took these sensors and quickly built 2 sails and rudders to control the game. As I focused a lot f time on creating the props for the game, the rest of the team decided it would be best to go with a very minimal approach to the art in the game, building most of the world with Unity assets, other than the duck, log, boats, boulders, buoys, and finish line. I also created a simple UI to show the current speed that the boat was traveling.

After quite a bit of work and several set backs from getting Unity to pick up the
Phidgets sensors correctly, we finished the game, and submitted it to jury for the BVW festival. about a week later we found out the game made it to festival and that we had a week and a half to polish the game and build a themed room to match. Luckily we were placed in a room facing out, viewing the river and boat docks that run right by the building. We decided that it worked perfectly and built our own docks out of cardboard in the room. We pushed this theme into the costume the player would wear as well, that being red or blue team life-jackets, accompanied by the players yacht hat.