Blog Posts
Designing for a 20ft Screen
Designing the UI for Escape Velocity posed many unique challenges due to being a part of the Obsidian Bay experience. Obsidian Bay is a new entertainment project that has players use physical prop guns to play games on a massive projected screen. I had the opportunity to intern at Striker Arena, the company behind Obsidian Bay, and work on Escape Velocity, an on rails shooter where two players must work together to escape from an alien spaceship utilizing limited ammo. One other key gameplay feature is that if both players shoot a button on the UI, it will activate a shield protecting them from all damage for a short period of time.
Designing for an Ecosystem
When designing Escape velocity, I had to think about engagement in ways that I haven't had to before. This is because instead of being a standalone product where you are purchasing that and that is the whole experience, is instead part of a larger ecosystem in which you would play not just this, but other games as part of the Obsidian Bay. Obsidian Bay is a product by Strike Arena in which players reserve this bay where they have prop guns that have things like recoil and laser sights and you play games on a large 20-foot projected screen. Each game is short and can be swapped quickly. So, each game is not a standalone engagement experience, but rather part of a larger cohesive whole, and so I had to take that into account while working on Escape Velocity.