Playscape: How to Build a Galaxy
Internship
In 2024 I undertook an internship at Katie Dale-Everett Dance on the Playscape project. A unique mixed reality performance that utilises full motion capture technology to bring play and dance together in an immersive virtual world. A performance where performers and audience members are active participants. On this project, I worked with a multinational, multidisciplinary team in a provincial capacity using my design expertise to improve the quality of life for players and performance operators.
My Contributions
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Game Design Expertise: I applied my game design expertise to improve the project's UX creating a smoother experience for performance operators and players.
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Gameplay Improvements: I iterated on interactive features based on observations and feedback from players and proformers. Such as implementing new features to help players understand how to interact with certain mechanics.
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Programming Assistance: I assisted programming leads by debugging and improving minor mechanics allowing them to focus on the greater tasks where their expertise would be most valuable.
My Work
Performance operator UX improvements
One of my main contributions to this project was improving the user experience for the performance operator, the person who controls the program while both performers and the audience engage with the experience.
Among the most impactful of my UX contributions was adding greater control options with an intuitive UI. These include adding UI elements that allow operators to reset trails, inputs to alter trail parameters at run time, and a system to save altered parameters between performances.
Bake Trail Settings and saver
Trail Culler
Trial Lifetime Control
Constellation Star Particles
One of the systems I implemented was particle effects that travelled from the player's position to the star's position in the constellation scene. A scene where players draw lines between randomly generated stars in a consolation. This is a feature I ideated, designed, and implemented with feedback from the project lead to solve the issue of players not understanding the goal of the current scene. The particles are used to draw the attention of the player to encourage them to interact the star.
Baked Trail Culling
I implemented a system to cull baked trails after a customisable amount of time in the baked trail scene. A scene where players get to skywrite and juggle their creations between each other. This was implemented due to a problem where the number of baked trails would overwhelm players making it hard to see what they were drawing going against the intended player experience.
I also implemented the aforementioned UI to control the settings for the baked trails.
Trace settings
A minor addition was implementing UI to control the lifetime of traced trails. A scene that uses trails like ballet streamers. This was done to allow performance operators to edit trace trail length in real time to better suit the circumstances.
