On this project, I mainly developed the digital part of the experience in Unity, while the rest of the team mainly worked on the electronics and physical prototyping.
OurCity
On this project, I mainly developed the digital part of the experience in Unity, while the rest of the team mainly worked on the electronics and physical prototyping.
OurCity is targeted towards kids ages 7-10, which is a time period in which they start learning more abstract concepts and are developing social skills. OurCity is a city building game that helps kids learn empathy and problem solving through following character prompts that tell them what they need in the city to make the best city for them. The kids collaboratively build a city out of modular blocks and facades onto a board, that gets doubled into an immersive digital version of the city that they can explore after rebuilding.
Unity
Arduino
Rhino
Cinema 4D
Blender
3d Printing
Procreate
We designed the board in a hexagonal shape because of how it encourages collaboration due to being more circular than a rectangular design and it makes it something that kids can all gather around instead of having defined sides for each kid. The board was lasercut out of wood for our prototype, and has lights surrounding into each hexagon that light up when you're building or for certains story elements. Each triangle of each hexagon has a small magnet to conduct electricity and to help the building blocks snap into place. There's a button embedded in the side for interacting with the digital experience.
The triangular building pieces were designed to be modular, to let kids build pretty much any shape they want, inside hexagonal city blocks, across those blocks, and up as tall as possible. These pieces were 3d printed, with copper tape on the top and bottom to conduct electricity and wires and a resistor running through them.
The facades were designed to be minimal to let them work for multiple storylines, but they still had to obviously be certain types of buildings, like hospital, library, apartments, etc because the facades are the only thing that defines the type of building in the digital city. The shape of the building is fully up to the kids and what they think is best for the city. These prototype facades were lasercut, with a 3d printed backing that slides into the building blocks.
Kids build their cities following prompts from characters, and those characters are tied to each storyline that the kids can play. We focused on our Godzilla storyline for all of our prototyping, and theoretically there would be a list of stories that the kids could pick, each with different characters and reasons for rebuilding.
The digital double of the city was designed to be essentially the city that the kids built on the board, but with a higher level of detail and a little more life from things moving around, as well as to have a place for characters to prompt the kids with what they need.
For our Godzilla storyline, the whole city is built on an island, and the buildings that characters prompt for are generally sci-fi inspired, like power stations and hyperrail trains, but that still are building types that a kid could make sense of, like libraries and hospitals. The digital buildings for the Godzilla storyline have some sci-fi inspired greeble textures and bright lights.
The characters popup from the bottom of the city, first to tell the kids what they need in the newly rebuilt city, and once they finish the building, give a short piece of feedback on how well the kids did. It's not supposed to feel very negative because it doesn't really matter that much if they do a "bad job", but we felt like it was needed for some reinforcement to the idea that you're building for these people. The prompts start off more specific, and gradually start being less about specific placement and more about referencing other buildings and building relative to them. Some prompts are designed to make the kids think more, like when two twins are having an argument about where they want a store.
We utilized a projection setup where the floor is a top view of the city to get an overview of what you've built, and the wall becomes more point-of-view with the camera zooming to whatever spot is currently being built in.
A full playthrough of the Godzilla story can take around 30 minutes to an hour. We printed roughly enough pieces to play around half a full game.
We knew early on that we wanted to design something for kids to learn empathy, and we settled on a city building concept fairly early on. We spent a long time figuring out exactly how modular or how preset the buildings should be - at certain points, we had blocks for different shapes/fractions of hexagons but felt that they were unnecessary, we tried more realistic square shaped blocks but they didn't work with our hexagonal grid. We went with individual triangles because they feel like building blocks that we've all played with before, and they allow building pretty much any shape that we personally wanted to be able to build (including as tall as possible which was the first thing we tried).
The digital city was more of a straightforward progression, we pretty much knew exactly what we wanted for it and the visual style was the primary thing that changed significantly throughout our process. The biggest thing that we added later in the process was probably the tutorial section, which served a dual purpose of teaching the kids how to use the blocks, as well as helping populate the city with buildings that act as obstacles to problem solve around when building.
We had a lot of ideas that we would have come back to, the biggest being a concept where Godzilla (or whatever bad event from the storyline) comes back and destroys a building or two that the kids have already built, so they have to do a little more problem solving. We also did not end up creating park/greenspace blocks, but these would have likely been full hexagons that could be used for obstacles, as well as just adding more life and color to the city, and can be seen in almost all of these early concepts.
