Services: Visual Design, UI/UX Design, Game Design and Development, Animation, Physical Computation, Fabrication, Installation
Key Takeaways
- comprehensive physical experience that sought to engage participants in a full game creation, activation, digitization and physicalization of game and assets
- completed in a blazingly fast two months with an exceptional team
- “Best in Show” blue ribbon winner
Maker Faire is billed as “the greatest show and tell on earth” and Nickelodeon, the channel destination for youth edutainment, needed a physical/digital experience for their booth marketing a new and popular show about young game-creators and coders titled Game Shakers.
In trying to ideate over what this experience might be, I immediately starting thinking about my past life as an animator working in cartoons and how much of a similar experience is ported over to game design. Because HANDS-ON is the name of the game, I thought an apt intro to the experience of making a game is to make a game of one’s own. This idea would incorporate programming the elements in the game world as well as character design. The resultant programming sheet was a hit with participants. We called the game, Donut Dash, a reference to existing ficitional material from the TV show.
Participants would spend some time at a table, figuring out all of the elements that they would eventually play and keep as a take home suprise.
The next stage of the experience was to program the game. The worksheet was inserted into a robot (a set piece from the actual show) and digitized via Augmented Reality.
The character and programming elements were then extracted and immediately launched into a timed game the participant played.
I crafted the game interface after some existing assets since our timeline, as usual, was very very short. This saved time on original asset creation which typically tends to be an expected bottleneck. But the results turned out better than expected. I still had to do some asset creation but using the TV show and Nickelodeon IP as a guide, it was pretty easy.
After completion, the participants character printed out on a hero card to be framed in a branded notebook as an ultimate experience takeaway. The animated character also appeared as a usable GIF in perpetuity in a branded section on the Giphy website. You can see the breadth of characters created by visiting Giphy.
The booth itself was a faithful recreation of the actual Nickelodeon show, all hand built and installed by our team. The bright colors and fun objects really made the booth stick out to passersby, which is why we were such a popular stop along the Maker Faire route.
View the Nickelodeon branded spot below to see much of this work in action!
Technologies: APIs, Folder Actions, iOS App Development, Figma, After Effects, Networking