- Role: Game Designer and sound designer
- Platform: PC and Mac
- Development tool: Unity
-Development time: One week
Spaceship Frenzy: Damage Control is a location-based entertainment experience designed for the Makey Makey as a part of the Building Virtual Worlds course at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center. For the lightning round, teams of 5 are given one week to build a playable game on the assigned platform. For our experience, we thought about ways in which we could use the Makey Makey in new and innovative ways.
The scenario for the game is that you and your partner are explorers trapped on an alien spacecraft and your objective is to try and figure out how the controls work to land the craft. The spaceship helps you out by giving you button input combinations to hit, but you don't know what the buttons mean, as they are written in alien symbols. The objective of the game is to learn the interface of the alien spacecraft and to quickly input the button combinations as they appear of the screen. We even added scenarios where the players must link hands in order to close the circuit and successfully press the Makey Makey buttons. Failure to press the correct button combinations results in a piece of the spaceship blowing up. Players are given six lives that come in the form of pieces of the ship. Players lose if all pieces of the ship are blown up, but as long as they are able to keep one piece in tact to the end, they win the game.
One of the most interesting things about our game is the unique buttons that we created for it. Since guests are on an alien spacecraft, we wanted to create a wacky and strange interface that makes guests feel like they are in a strange, alien world. One important part of achieving that was creating strange button icons for guests to interpret, but we also wanted guests to have a unique tactile experience. One thing that came to mind for us when we thought of the word "alien" was "squishy." Aliens are often portrayed as having squishy bodies, and they often breed offspring that live in squishy cocoons. We decided to apply that idea to the buttons of our physical prop interface, and to achieve that, we created a custom putty that would maintain its squishy texture. We then wrapped the putty with plastic wrap, and then sealed the putty and plastic inside of aluminum foil cases. We needed to create an exterior surface that would be conductive in order to complete the electrical circuit required for the Makey Makey, but we also liked how the putty looked wrapped in aluminum foil. The metal aesthetic strongly evoked a spaceship, and really brought the physical interface together nicely. We received a lot of positive feedback from guests about our interface, and about the buttons in particular. People really enjoyed the feeling of pressing putty buttons, and they said it was unlike any gaming experience they had ever had before!
My responsibilities for the project included designing the interface for the Makey Makey prop, designing the buttons for the prop, building the prop (there were 3 of us working together to build the prop), and creating the music and sound effects for the game.