game & level design
SOLAR-A-TRON 5000
Role | Solo Project Duration | 5 Months Tools Used | Unity, C#, Maya
Solar-A-Tron 5000 is one of several game experiences made for Chevron's Kern County Power Lab museum that I worked on during my two internship sessions with the Two Bit Circus Foundation.
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Intended to populate a museum exhibit with a mad scientist meets renewable energy theme, the project features Kinect integration in which the player orients a solar panel with their body movement in order to capture photons from the sun.
DESIGN PROCESS - GAME CONCEPT ​
As aforementioned, Solar-A-Tron 5000 and the other installments that we worked on for the Kern County Power Lab Museum were intended to populate a museum exhibit themed around a mad scientists lab and his experimentations with renewable energy sources. This project in particular was contextualized under collecting photons from the mad scientist's artificial sun machine while avoiding falling asteroids.
TAKEAWAYS AND CHALLENGES
Setting up and implementing Kinect integration and control in a Unity project is a tool I can now proudly wear on my tool belt! (Though not necessarily one I would jump at using again...)
Utilizing the Kinect as a controller involved a lot of design considerations that I had not thought about before. For instance I had to set up extra scenes utilizing the Kinect camera that would display into the game allowing the player to prepare their positioning as well as allowing for the Kinect to properly calibrate.
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Being resourceful with assets was a key takeaway from my time with the Two Bit Circus foundation and in this project I refurbished a model from Don't Starve to act as our tutorial scientist while doing additional modeling work in Maya to fully set up the scene.
