SOARIN’
When our client approached us to work on the relaunch of the Soarin’, I couldn’t have been more excited. Soarin’ Over California was being relaunched with a new global film for the ride and the queue line at the EPCOT theme park in Orlando had gone through a complete renovation.
Our client wanted to create an interactive experience to help guests pass the time, as the wait line can be close to three plus hours on heavy attendance days.
After getting briefed by the client, my team and I brainstormed concepts and figured out a way to gamify the wait. We needed to create an experience that would take advantage of the five 25-foot projection screens and add a mobile component as well.
We created the concept of a round-based trivia game that would take guests around the world to answer questions and gain badges for correct answers. I also created several interactive concepts that would engage the guests and encourage them to participate with other people in the line. My creative goal was to get potential strangers to bond through gamification. There are few places where this might work, but a theme park is certainly one of them. These interactive interludes would encourage team spirit and camaraderie between family, friends, and people you’ve never met before.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
As park guests entered the queue, signage and Disney cast members encouraged them to download the app.
After the quick download, players got to pick a color team and then they were assigned a Passenger ID. Passenger ID’s were used instead of players’ actual names for player autonomy when picking a name. The Passenger ID’s are based on actual domestic airport codes.
The way the question gameplay works is that the player has 30 seconds to answer each question. The quicker they answer, the more points they earn. The game was also built to identify the player’s speed compared to their own team and the overall speed across all four teams. Players also earned passport stamps each time they answered a correct question about a country they had not been to yet which provided the player with badging rewards.
Passport stamps were created as a badging system in the game. Sixty individual badges were created for different countries, each depicting a famous landmark or geographical site. The design process included many variations meant to reinforce the slick, modern, digital aspect of the game and the queue itself before landing on the digital yet tactile badge feel.
Players’ scores are tallied and presented on the large screens and on their mobile devices, showing each team’s cumulative progress. There is also a scrolling leader board at the bottom of the screen calling out the quickest to answer correctly on each team or, as they are called in the game,”Fastest Flyers”.
There are multiple styles of questions, but all are easy to use on a mobile device or casually playing off of the large monitors.
Each game round lasts between 8-12 minutes. Players can drop in and out as they wish. As for the game engine itself, game play repeats consistently with no repeating questions or content for four hours. This is to assure that no one guest will ever get the same question in one queue line experience.
At the end of each round, the highest scoring team is declared the winner and encouraged to hold up their glowing team colored phone screens. As guests close out their queue experience, we created a leaderboard that will display their Passenger ID if they had a “Sky-High Streak” of answering multiple correct questions in a row and/or if they were in the Top 50 within the last hour.
The game also remembers guest’s scores and passport stamps history if they return later the same day, same week, month or within the year.
Here is a time lapse video that shows how much content flows as guest wait in line.
As with any large digital-to-physical install, there was an amazing development team behind this game.
Core Team:
Alan Hellard – Creative Director/Writer
Ryan Pennington – Project and Account Lead
Hideo Igawa – Art Director
Lynne Gaza – Producer
Symon Coak – Project Manager
Michelle Brady – Designer
Jessica Esparza – Designer
Nayeon Kim – Development Lead