Harry Potter VR Dark Ride Concept

Type: Group Project (15 People)

Duration: January 2023 - April 2023

Description: The Harry Potter VR Dark Ride Concept (also called Triwizard VR) takes place on the grounds of Hogwarts, a school dedicated to the teaching of magic to witches and wizards. Our game centers around the Triwizard tournament, a multi-school tournament that takes place every five years. Each school (there are three) has a chosen champion that must succeed through a series of trials in order to win the Triwizard Cup for their school. We decided to design a trial around the lighting of lanterns, where players will have to confront various obstacles along the way.

Purpose: The team’s ultimate goal was to create a quality multiplayer prototype for what could be a dark ride at a Universal Studios theme park. For myself, I wanted to design for what would be a very curated, linear, but exciting experience. This meant focusing more on story beats and “moments” in the prototype instead of traditional golden path/breadcrumbing/etc. that would be present in a traditional level.

Tools Used: Unreal 5, Blueprints, Photoshop, Miro

Concepting

(Early brainstorming/layouts of what would be The Black Lake section)

With the project’s main requirement being to prototype a theme park dark ride we knew going in we would have a highly linear/curated experience. This meant prioritizing aspects such as framing/pacing/etc. far more than what would otherwise be done in a traditional game level. There is no golden path, no need to direct the player. The player is on a set path and would not be able to deviate meaningfully.

Locking the player position meant saving complexity during pre-production/initial designs but meant our final product had to be of higher quality. If we are going to limit player freedom, the player needs to feel the benefit of that decision.

With our team’s initial constraints, I went to work designing The Black Lake portion of the level to start. Knowing that our prototype would be in VR and our players would be on fast-moving brooms, I designed for very few turns and when present they would be wide arching over a significant area to reduce motion sickness. I also had to focus on the resources dedicated to each of my sections and how to best showcase them. For instance, in The Black Lake there is a squid monster that would be created. Making sure the squid was a showcase moment in The Black Lake would be hugely important as these types of assets would be costly for our art team to create.

Whiteboxing/
Prototyping

Given our focus on this being a prototype and our main locomotion mechanic being system driven rather than player-driven, the majority of metrics were built around establishing scale, giving enough room in our paths for at least three players, and making sure our different sections connected seamlessly.

This meant implementing very simple/quick geo to establish our path. The sooner we laid the path, the sooner we could test our ride system on it and adjust if need be.

Creating set-piece moments along our game path was a key objective for my team. This meant the vast majority of our art budget was dedicated to creating proxy creature assets. This meant for every area I designed there needed to be a prominent space dedicated to these creatures as they would be the focus of their areas.

Early in the project, it became clear that the team’s programming budget would fall significantly short of what we initially planned for. Given my background in Software Engineering as well as professional experience I offered to extend the scope of my involvement to also implement most of the major gameplay systems for our prototype. One of the early systems implemented was a machine-learning gesture recognition system. This would have allowed us to mimic Harry Potter spell motions as depicted in the books/films.

We ended up scrapping this feature late in development to further focus in on our core features.

I also worked to quickly implement the main core mechanics for our game. This included developing a ride system that would reliably transport our players as well as made creating player paths easy for design. I also developed the project’s systems for spell-casting, score-tracking, lantern lighting, and more. You will see many of these systems demonstrated below.

Major Gameplay Concepts

RideSystem

In order to replicate the dark ride experience, the player's movement had to be very restricted as our game was built/balanced around a very specific path. This was also done to limit scope as well as make sure we did not overwhelm players. Theme park rides are very accessible, so having players both manage their position as well as aiming at targets at high speeds was found to be far too much.

Spell Casting

Continuing with the theme of accessibility the team needed the spell-casting mechanic to be very intuitive. I prototyped many spell-casting setups to experiment with aiming, making the spellcasting more expressive (gestures/flicking the wand) but eventually, we landed on the tried and true point-and-shoot. This made the controller feel more like we were pointing a magic gun but proved to be the more intuitive solution.

I also extended this accessibility to the target lanterns. Each lantern has a customizable sphere trigger that could be changed in size. This meant players were not required to hit the lantern mesh itself but rather hit the approximate “area” of the lantern. This greatly increased the range of player that could have fun in our level.

Scoreboard

With our game being multiplayer and our theme centering on a tournament, score tracking was a necessity. This meant tying together the spell-casting system, lantern system, and scoreboard system together so that each and every spell cast had a player tag. This meant each spell cast could communicate through the various game systems as well as each player’s networked system.

This opened up the door to also color-coding the lanterns based on player hit. Players could now easily see who hit what in real-time, creating a greater feeling of competition and accomplishment.

Character Set Pieces

Being set in a magical world means showcasing fantastical characters to keep players interested. As a team, we centered on three major monsters. A Zouwu, a giant squid, and a sphynx. Each distinct area of our game would be defined by these creatures and the players would have light interactions with the Zouwu to further immerse the players.

Level Flow

(For this section I will only be going over the various sections I designed)

Hagrid’s Hut

Hagrid’s Hut takes place at the very start of the game. Taking this into account I went with a far more open field with lanterns spread out across the area. This is to divvy up the eye space of our players so they have a better chance at targeting different lanterns. If I went more narrow there is a danger that skill differences in players would become more pronounced early on, possibly losing less skilled players in the process.

Black Lake

The Black Lake takes place immediately after Hagrid’s Hut and is in fact far more narrow for many of the reasons Hagrid’s Hut isn’t. We can safely assume players are at least acquainted with our mechanics the skill gap has lessened between players.

The focus now is on bringing competition to the forefront. More narrow spaces mean directing each of the players’ eyes to a smaller area which means players will be targeting the same lanterns.

Sphynx Arena

The Sphynx Arena exists at the tail end of our game and serves as a showcase of our proxy art assets more than anything. With two of our larger art assets taking center stage I did not want to add extensive geography or lanterns that would end up detracting from the “moment” that is these two characters meeting.

Setting a few lanterns around the Sphynx assures our players focus on the Sphynx’s only appearance and leaves their attention open for when the Zouwu enters the arena.

Closing Thoughts

Overall I am very happy with where we ended up for this dark ride prototype. My focus was more divided across disciplines which is not ideal for where I am at in my career, but it is what the project called for and I do not regret being that flexible for the team.

That being said there is a cost incurred. If I was solely a Level Designer for this project I could have worked to further refine geo as well as maybe include some more “set piece moments” that would vary up the playthrough. The easiest tell here is the seaweed barrier that boxes in the player during the beginning portion of Black Lake. It’s a single mesh repeated and you can tell. Most players will not notice it on the first playthrough, but it is pretty apparent and something I could have fixed given more time.

Continuing that thought if I was only a gameplay programmer I could have worked longer on smoothing out our networking across clients as well as changing up our ride system to be smoother. The ride system currently uses a waypoint system as opposed to a spline system. The benefit is you can get it up and running quickly and adjustments are a breeze, the real cost of the system comes at the refinement stage as in order to get consistently smooth movement requires a number of waypoint placements and fine-tuning. If I had another week smoothing out the system was at the top of my list.