Cologne Game Lab // RELEASED
VR Time Travel
Co-Location Multiplayer VR Experience on Oculus Quest
In this 4-player VR experience, developed for the new Zukunftmuseum in Nürnberg, you step into a future projection to find out as much as you can about possible timelines. Enjoy a stroll around a fully robot-operated market and discover what 2050 Nürnberg has to offer.
FACT SHEET
- Type Research Project
- Genre Co-Location VR Experience
- Tools Unity, Plastic SCM, Jira, Slack
- Platform Android (Oculus Quest 2)
- Timeframe 19 months
- Released September 2021
- Team 20+
KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS
- leading Game Design role in a team of 20+ people
- working with limitations and fulfilling a specific brief
- designing for a museum audience
PRESS
THE PROJECT
This project was a research cooperation between the German Museum and the Cologne Game Lab. In their newly opening branch, the Museum of the Future, the museum had dedicated an 75 m² area for an on-location VR experience. The joint venture’s goal was to fill this space with a gaming experience which lets the visitors take a glimpse into the near future of Nürnberg.
Since its opening in September 2021, several dozen visitors are taking part in the VR time travel every day.
VERSATILITY
Over time, my design responsibilities shifted from designing the core gameplay and narrative, to creating the level layout and balancing the missions. I designed the look and feel of the AR User Interface for all objects and worked closely together with our 3D artists, providing them with additional concepts.
DESIGNING FOR A BROAD AUDIENCE
The most challenging part of the game design was to make the game as accessible as possible to a broad target group: the visitors of the future museum. Kids, parents and grandparents should be able to play this game together and cooperate in finding objects on our „future market“ that would fit the current objective. As a result, the game design had to cater to many different player types. Our interactive environment invites observation, exploration and experimentation, while still offering an optional, more task-driven challenge for players that are already familiar with Virtual Reality.
TAKING THE LEAD
I accompanied this project as a design lead from start to finish. It was daunting, but also exciting, to take on this much responsibility for a project and developing a location-based game remotely with over 20 people involved proved to be an especially challenging task. I learned how to work in a big team and how to communicate effectively with different departments. Although there are naturally some cutbacks with a project of this size and complexity, we ultimately mastered the challenge and are very happy with the final result.
BEHIND THE SCENES
