The game is conceptually simple. Have participants answer three questions and give them a rating when they are finished. But how do you track everyone’s progress? And how do you cycle hundreds or even thousands of attendees through the experience in a timely manner? And how do you make it match the scale of Caterpillar’s machinery and brand?
Rabcup designed four separate computing stations with touch capabilities, three stations allowed attendees to pick their answers, and the last station displayed their final result. Each attendee was given an RFID that kept track of their name and answers and notified the system if the attendee had skipped any steps. Attendees would walk the path, interacting with touchscreens, LIDAR sensors, and RFID scanners, all while being immersed in a giant 20-screen panoramic moving landscape.
Every station was designed to facilitate a “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” style game, with branching choices and randomized challenges. And at the end, the experience would segue directly into conversations on The Caterpillar Foundation’s philanthropic work.
I worked on the design of the game and the look of the visuals while the heavy lifting of having multiple computers run the same game in different stages concurrently was done by the people at Big Red Button.
Watch the video of the finished experience at CONEXPO 2020.
CREDITS
Client: Caterpillar Foundation
Design + Production: Rabcup
Art Direction + Game Design + Animation: Mandel Lum
Game Development: Big Red Button