Route 95
Awarded the Sammy’s 2016 Technical Achievement Award
A collaboration with Aaron Desin, Marco Iskandar, and Alyan Shafique
Unity, Mesh Manipulation, Scrum Project Management
BACKGROUND
Route 95 is an audio-visual interactive experience that puts the player into the role of a Desert Rock musician.
The player composes songs with multiple instruments and once they're completed, the player can play them in a playlist that affects the desert environment to create their own personal road trip through the desert on Route 95. This project was made with Unity.
We were inspired by the amazing desert biome and beloved long roadtrips with great tunes!
PROJECT GOALS
Our main goal was to create a unique experience by fully utilizing our strengths as individual team members over the course of 6 months to bring a finished, playable product to show to our peers and professors. This was to emulate a full development cycle in the games industry.
USER TUTORIALS
As we were creating this project, we recognized how daunting it would be for a new user to fully utilize the amount of creative freedom that we wanted to give them (or to even begin the attempt). Usually, a game might onboard their players with simple scenarios that encourage small scale experimentation and discovery of novel mechanics, or short narration that guides the player on which buttons to press and when.
Because Route 95 is a fairly full featured song creator, we wanted to give players a broad and comprehensive look at what they could play around with; we decided on making a series of video tutorials that would walk them through the whole process of song creation and performance.
PROCESS
Route 95 was our team of four’s Senior Capstone Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We developed this from idea to finished product over six months, each of us choosing to specialize in certain parts of the project. I chose to focus on the world generation, which included code based mesh manipulation of the terrain, translating audio spectrograms to 3D vertex data, and other procedurally generative techniques to allow the game world to be as expressive as the music the player creates.
We utilized a Scrum framework to organize production; by dividing the desired features into small, actionable goals, we were able to plan short sprints and evaluate our progress frequently to help pace ourselves for completion by our deadline. Procedurally generating the gameworld to each and every note the player designs in their custom songs became far more manageable a task when starting with creating a custom triangle mesh in Unity via code, for instance.
To create the procedural world generation, I started off by creating a plane with moderate vertex density to serve as the chunks of the gameworld (similar to Minecraft’s chunks but 2D vertices instead of 3D voxels). The vertices of the plane would then be raised or lowered in height when coming into range of the camera based on a circular mapping of the game’s audio spectrogram (which is also visible on the horizon). The road code was partially adapted from Aaron Desin’s previous work which utilized bezier curves. This ensured the road and the velocity of the car to appear continuous to the player. The greeble was added to the world with a random distribution, triggered by specific instruments.
Recognition
This is the Route 95 team at the 2016 UCSC Sammy Awards.
Pictured (left to right):
Jim Whitehead (Professor), Michael Mateas, Richard Pittman (myself), Marco Iskandar, Aaron Desin — Not pictured: Muhammad Alyan Shafique
TAKEAWAYS
Route 95 was a great experience of team based development on a serious project. I learned first hand the benefit of letting people specialize and working together to create a well rounded product that is allowed to excel in many areas because of that individual specialization. For myself, I learned the importance of dividing production into small actionable tasks and I continue to use this strategy in my workflow.