Imagineering in a Box 2.4: Storyboarding
My original Blue Sky for my attraction revealed two possible attractions, which is about right for a land. But, I also started to see navigation as a means of both storytelling and attraction.
The first attraction I semi-fleshed out was a water flume ride that became a physical and virtual boat ride. Can’t picture that? My vision was a ride that started out as a ride that combines elements of Splash Mountain, the Calico River Rapids ride of Knott’s Berry Farm, and Pirates of the Caribbean.
From here, your ride vehicle would load into one of two types of ferry boats and the story would continue completely virtually using the windows of the ferry similar to the ways that windows or portholes tell the story on Finding Nemo Submarine ride or Hogwarts Express Train Ride.
The idea is that the ride is a form of transportation in the same way that the Hogwarts Express train ride is. You start in the present and ride into the tech mecca. Alternatively, for families who were uninterested or unable to ride the attraction, the bridges would act as people-movers and storytelling in one.
The problem was, I couldn’t come up with a story to tell. I wanted to move from the present to the future and didn’t quite know how to make that transition.
So, I asked for help. My friend gave me a completely different idea altogether, but she also pointed out that I was ignoring the original IP. I had become so focused on telling the story of my world instead of the story of Ready Player One that I had actually lost sight of the agency that would make people want to experience the story of that land in the first place.
She also suggested that I throw out the “Present” part of my land altogether and, instead, tell the story of how we got to the stacks in a more Carousel of Progress-type ride except the ride would move backward in time to explain how we got to the dystopian present. That’s a really intriguing idea.
It also brings up a concept that I’m very familiar with from game design: Being willing to kill your babies. I have built every exercise in this class around the idea of moving from life into dust via a media center. Media being the center was partly symbolic. Plus, I’m kind of in love with this ride idea.
But, it doesn’t really work. Nature’s a great thing, but attraction-wise, it’s not that fun when you’re trying to control the experience. Yet, I still feel like there has to be a transition of some sort to the media-driven world. In your design process, you have to be willing to get rid of things you love if they’re not fun or you can’t make them work.
Yet, like in the Blue Sky lesson, it’s not a matter of tossing the idea away completely. It’s something that you shelve that may work in part or fully in a different project or part of the project.
I liked her idea, but I decided to work up the second attraction idea I’d had.
HOLODECK ATTRACTION
From the very beginning of this class, I knew I wanted the media center to be a virtual “dungeon” of attractions. When I was searching out map layout ideas for the Creating Worlds class, I found a dungeon that fit kind of perfectly!
In my case, you enter via 1 and 2 and take one of 4 portals to 4 different adventures. The Oasis has various zones and worlds in which people can experience different things. Some of those worlds aren’t very conducive to theme park experiences, however.
My zones are the
- Gamer Experience
- Adrenaline Sports
- RPG
- Vacation World
Gamer Experience
- Super Adventure Box (GW2)/Minecraft World
- Street Fighter or Battle Royale type game
- Car Racing
Adrenaline Sports
- Skydiving
- wipEout HD-type racing including water tracks
- Kite surfing experience
RPG
- I initially thought this was a multi-game experience like Pern/Skyrim vs Kingdoms of Amalur, etc.
- Instead, I decided this would be a three-room experience in which you get to live the adventure in a way similar to Evermore park. So, sort of like the three parts of a plot, in this case finding the keys and fighting through.
Vacation World
- Visit the 7 Wonders
- Fantasy Location 1(such as visiting Gotham and the Bat Cave, for instance)
- Fantasy Location 2
The challenge of this attraction is that all of the pacing in the various experiences needs to be controlled and similar. The thing I love about this idea is that it has re-rideability. Like the Star Wars maker attractions in Galaxy’s Edge, I want land visitors to be able to choose a “custom” experience.
I used Canva to create my storyboards.
https://www.canva.com/create/storyboards/
As I stated earlier, visitors enter in Incipio and choose a path card. The portals (ride vehicles) take them to, and through, their chosen experience but they have to go through all three parts of only one experience per ridethrough.
Although the class only requires that I work up one ride idea and that’s enough work, I do want to flesh out my other two ideas just because the experience of working on them will give me a better vision for my land. I haven’t decided completely whether or not I’m going to ditch the present. I have yet to decide how to incorporate the carousel ride. I love the idea of the backstory, but I also don’t want to diminish the impact of coming out of the fun of the VR world into the dystopia that is The Stacks. Part of that is also going to be filling in some of the historical information that’s not in the book. That’s also part of the design process when you’re creating worlds.
