Altitude is a prototypical skydiving game built in two weeks using Unity and the Xbox adaptive controller. The world was meant to bring players out of their comfort zone into a world where they are attempting a dangerous skydive onto a tropical island.
Visual Design
The visual design for this game was meant to be cartoonish and colorful. I stuck to a warm palette to communicate the sense of warmth on this tropical island, and wanted to use a rounded shape language to communicate the over the top cartoonishness of the world. UI Elements were meant to be simple and thematic.
Gameplay Experience
This game was very unique in that its gameplay involved movement of the whole body. The team had the idea to have players spread out on top of an air mattress, pressing buttons at the four corners to lean in the direction of the buttons.
While we liked the instability of the air mattress, we wanted more instability and we wanted the user to be farther away from the screen and the ground. We first tried propping the air mattress up on chairs, however this ended up with the player not being supported in the middle, which was not ideal for our goal.
In the end, we decided to stack two air mattresses on top of each other in order to achieve the goal of height and instability. Through playtesting, we found that we had to place buttons on the extreme ends of the air mattress in order to get players to engage their full bodies, otherwise they were likely to prop themselves up and simply press the buttons.
As an added touch of immersion, the team added fans blowing on the player to make them feel movement. We found that this helped with motion sickness and the suspension of disbelief for this skydiving game.
Collaborators
Ben Morris, Ruohao Jing, Yuelin Liu, Jiawei Li
Cayla Kennedy 