Nicholas Drobes

Project Details

The MCO Family Play Area kiosk is an installation of M3D's Merge system, which allows players to walk up to a large screen and see themselves put directly inside a game using real-time trackerless motion capture. The games created for the Merge system are designed to capitalize on the fun of having players interact with the games using their physical movement as a control scheme. This installation in the Orlando International Airport as well as the three custom games that were created for it were both completed in 2 months.

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• Studio: M3D Technologies

• Type: Interactive Kiosk

• Engine: Unreal Engine 5

• Scale: 1000+ players per day

• Team Size: 6

My Contributions

As a Technical Designer, I was tasked with creating and refining the gameplay and content for all three games. Within a short timeframe, I was able to find creative ways to bring to life concept proposals that had gone through an intricate approval process; making sure gameplay was engaging without deviating from the approved concepts. My contributions included:

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• Developed mechanics and gameplay from prototype to launch for 3 Merge games:

  • Flappy Wings, a Flappy Bird-inspired game that allows players to fly over a 3D scan of downtown Orlando while dodging clouds and collecting balloons by flapping their arms to fly.

  • Luggage Loader, a game that allows players to use their hands to push luggage from a conveyor belt into the cargo hold of a plane getting ready for takeoff.

  • Mural Painter, a game that allows players to use their hands to throw paint at a wall to reveal an airport mural.​​​

• Developed a system to support pre-rendered backgrounds that reacted to camera movement by using a custom depth pass global shader and level sequences.

• Created robust control systems that allowed players of all shapes, sizes, and abilities to interact with the games by using gestures and the motion of their body.

• Created a developer menu for adjusting game parameters in a shipped build. This allowed key values like object spawn rates or score thresholds to be changed on the fly to adapt to player preferences or client requests.

• Implemented data logging and analysis to provide valuable insights about player behavior and metrics about player acquisition and retention. The system I designed writes text to a file in csv format that is then imported into an excel sheet that has reports and tables.