Julian Ochoa

Overview: Quacktacular is an augmented reality experience made for the Meta II, giving guests the ability to participate in a bathtub stunt show.

Roles: Game Designer / Artist / Co-Producer

Personal Contributions: As a Game Designer, I helped in designing the world and gameplay mechanics and in iterating and playtesting the world. As an artist, I modeled and textured world-building assets in Maya. As a co-producer, I was responsible for running meetings and assisting in team scheduling.

Tasks:

• Designed bathtub layout to allow for better visual cues

• Designed ring function and movement without Meta II “grab” interaction

• Designed toy-like interactions within bathtub

Platform: Meta II | Team: 2 Programmers, 2 Artists, 1 Sound designer | Time: 2 Weeks | Engine: Unity 3D

World: Guests are transported back to the days of taking a bath with a rubber ducky, where they are treated to a spectacular show.

Design Challenge: Design a game in two weeks that exemplifies the theme “freedom” for a naive guest that plays it.

Design Goal: To never use the “grab” interaction on the Meta II.

Week 1:

Interaction Maps

Bathtub Prop and Bubble Shader

We began our design process by deciding which interactions we liked on the Meta II. We had seen the previous Meta II worlds break because of the AR headset’s finicky “grab” and “gaze” interactions. We decided to scrap them and only use the guest’s hand positions to create interactions. Daryl, an artist for our team, shared a video of a man filling his entire bathroom with what looked like thousands of rubber duckies. We all found the idea comical, so we decided on the theme of rubber duckies in the tub. We anticipated a naive guest being able to pop bubbles very easily by just “touching” them, so we decided to implement that mechanic. We all liked the song “Rubber Ducky” by Joe Raposo, so we thought we could implement in some way (possibly as a rhtyhm-based game).

I used Unity’s Shader Graph to design a bubble shader for the AR experience, but we had trouble implementing it at first. Kevin, one of the team’s programmers, knew how to write shaders, so he looked at the nodes and easily recreated it for the world. We thought it would be interesting if our guest was sitting in a bathtub prop, so we built one out of cardboard. Unfortunately for us, the Meta II’s display was tearing through the cardboard, and it looked awful. We had to ditch the prop.

By interim, we were popping bubbles in a beautiful bathtub with beautiful water. The intent was for the guest to “free” duckies from the bubbles, then for the duckie to land on its mom duckie and for the guest to save as many duckies as possible. We hit our goal, and we presented for interim.

Assets:

Interim Feedback:

At Interim, our instructors Jesse and Dave were worried at our plan to make a rhythm game. Though our initial presentation of showing off the environment and bubble-popping mechanic looked too simple, a rhythm game had the danger of being too complex (especially for a naive guest). They suggested that we focus on expanding on the mechanic and world we already had. They recommended finding a story and reason as to why these ducks were floating in bubbles, and why they needed to be saved. They also recommended we strengthen the visual language of the world to ensure guests know where the duckies are coming from. We had our work cut out for us.

Week 2:

The first challenge we decided to tackled was visual language. We shifted from a standard rectangular tub to a more angular one. We realized that by placing the guest at one end of the tub and shooting the duckies out directly in front of them, the tub’s edges would act as visual “leading lines” and point to the duck cannon. Then, after a day and a half of meeting and trying to salvage and simplify as much as we could from our rhythm game, we were worried about our game’s design. We decided to take a break that night and come back with a fresh mindset.

That night, I took a long look at our new bathtub and saw a very familiar shape. I am the kind of designer to throw completely new and obscure ideas in to the mix at meetings in an effort to refresh the conversation. In Round 2’s case, it was in seeing the new tub as a baseball diamond. At the following meeting, I pitched the idea of a baseball game. If the duckies were playing baseball, the guest would be the batter, knocking the baseballs out of the tub. Our programmers were immediately hesitant of the Meta II’s refresh rate. Though the baseball idea would not be successful, my efforts to refresh the conversation worked. Instead of the guest hitting the ball, we worked off of the guest possibly catching the baseballs. By the end of the meeting, we had designed a new world where the duckies were members of a “Quacktacular” stunt team, and the guest would save them at the end of the stunt.

The world turned into an Evel Knievel-inspired stunt show. Dialogue would play immediately upon entering the world that introduced the theme of the show. The dialogue was intended to introduce the guest to the weird and kooky theme of the world and to give the guest a sense of purpose. A bubble cannon would come up after the dialogue, a crowd would gather along the edges of the tub, and a hoop woul drise from the water. The hoop was designed as a way for the guest to slow down the bubble. If the bubble passed through the hoop, the bubble would slow down enough for the guest to be able to pop the bubble carefully. If the guest did not get the bubble through the hoop, the bubble would zoom past them and they would lose the duckie. This seemed like the right solution in my head, but, in the end, it turned out to be a confusing interaction.

We ran into an interesting dilemma during our playtest sessions. All five of our naive guests were completely ignoring the stunt show in front of them, and instead only wanted to play with the tub. Every guest touched the shower handle expecting something to happen, as well as tried to touch the duckies on the edge of the tub. We still had a large duck in the water to catch the duckies that fell out of the bubbles, and that large duck would bob in the water when touched. Every guest was impressed by this detail and spent the majority of their time playing with the duckie in the water.

So, we made the hard decision to use the last few days focusing on making everything in the tub interactive. The ducks on the edge of the tub would fall in and bob in the water when touched, the shower handle would trigger a particle effect that simulated the shower turning on, and the duckies that fell in the water would bob up and down when touched.

Final Thoughts:

Our naive guest gave our world a 5/10 in terms of the felling of “freedom”. Honestly, this was higher than I initially expected after seeing him play our world. Our assigned naive guest was completely confused by the experience, and I take full responsibility for the confusing interactions. We should have gone either 100% in on the idea of the bathtub being a “toy” or 100% into the quirky game-like mechanics of the bathtub show. If we had chosen the former, we could have scrapped the stunt show and added more interactions, like colored bubbles or a loofah that cleaned duckies, for example. If we revisited Quacktacular as it is now, I would ask the team if maybe a bubble wand was the solution to our confusion. If the duckies got shot out of the cannon, the guest might have to save the duckies with the wand in one hand, then pop them with the other, and we might be able to create a more meaningful interaction.