Tikatmos
By Matt Bethancourt, Zayna Sheikh, Andy DiLallo, Dani Emrich, Perry Owens
It is the distant future. Humanity has wiped itself out, but every single entity on Earth has become sentient. You run the info booth at the only Mall on Spaceship ATMOS, the ark that has left earth carrying one of every single being as they search out another place to call home. Using your speech translator, you will tune into the unique language of every customer, helping them find the information they are looking for. Additionally, your control center contains numerous tools for you to help, including a mall map, directory, camera system, control over the piped-in music, and more.
See more at Mouse & the Billionaire When beginning to think about a voice-controlled game experience, we wanted to focus on communication. The technological lapses in speech-recognition create an interesting opportunity to explore the inherent gaps in spoken communication. We exemplify this by having the player communicating specifically “through” a machine responsible for translating a variety of “languages” that innanimate objects might have. Additionally, while many voice-controlled games place the player in a role of commanding authority, we instead wanted to position the player as a helper, trying their best to communicate with these NPCs and help them gain the information they need. Lastly, we build out the entire game as an embodied experience, physically placing them in front of a large teller-style “window” into the world of the mall, along with a stylized microphone and neo-futurist control center. All of these decisions help to push empathy to the forefront of the experience as the player learns the various stories that unfold through the requests of the mall’s patrons.
Timeline
The Birth of the Space Mall
Brainstorm Session Notes:
- Multiple streams of info
- Infinite dungeon mall? -> Being separate and in a managereal role
- Combination of macro and micro management
- Dialing into the language translator
- Cash register or something for many transfers and exchanges
- Retro futurism vibe
Future + Mall + Management suff -> Maybe it's in space
Mall Things!
- Info booth
- Carts
- Fountains
- Kids play areas
- Small trains
- Santa photo booth
- Large box office stores
- Movie theatre
- Food court
- Fro-yo that is constantly changing to a new thing
- Competing similar stores (next door pretzle places)
- Art Galleyr?
- Mini-golf
- Escalators
- Arcade
- Parking garage
- Build-a-bear
Design Goals
- Assisting People
- Communication
Mall Sounds
We decided to incoporate a contemporary style of hypnogogic pop music called Mallsoft. It incorporates muzak played throughout malls in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. The idea is to recreate something in this style for our game.
Concept Art Exploration
Building on the retro-futurism style, we wanted to explore what that might look like to define the direction of the visual assets. Below is a set of both machine and visual explorations to work towards that consistant look and feel. Our favorite by far is the fourth option which has a nice balance of soft colors and vintage Jetsons feel, so the art assets will try to head in that direction for the future.
Retro Futurism Inspo
Out of our initial brainstorming came this idea of theming the visual direction of the game toward a sort of retro-futurism vibe. Inspired by the wacky ways in which people imagined the future straight out of the Jetsons, we took a little time to draw from these styles and create some initial mood boards.
And some fun fonts too!
There are a ton of funky retro machines that will probably influence the physical interface of the game design, here is sort of what we are thinking for that vibe:
Mall Scene Concepts
The next step in defining the visual style of the mall, is probably to ya know... try drawing what the mall might look like! So the next set of concept pieces look to what the mall spaces might look like on the inside. Referencing actual mall interiors, our concepts are shown below.
These concepts feel in line with the vibe we are going for and have a lot of fun retro elements to build on. While the final mall scenes will be much busier and full of miscelaneous sentient furniture and objects, these give a nice idea of the internal spaces and theme.
Interface Ideation
Since the game will be featuring two displays: the main info booth looking into the mall, and the mall interface options screen, we need to start thinking about how the interface screen will be laid out. One of the scenes for the interface display will be controlling the wellbeing of your desk plant. This is a nice simple place to start as far as interface, since the controls and options are a little more straight forward. Below is an idea of what the various interface options might look like.
I spent too long on this so I didn't get to the scrolling directory :(
But at least this works...
Multi-Display Work
Worked out the secondary display for the device. There are a few issues with the screen not resizing properly. To fix, we have been changing the window style (windowed, maximum vs. windowed) and that seems to be fixing the problem, but it's not a permanent solution.
The Window_Launch scene launches a secondary scene on the secondary display, which then is responsible for switching the "applications." We might spend some time thinking on how that could integrated to the main Game Manager for ease of later coding.... maybe.
Also of note, if the secondary display is an iPad, it can be run wireless, which leads to some super interesting future possibilities.
First test of AI movement in the Where's Waldo minigame
Created a maze sprite with a collider
Interface Display Graphic Mockups
Moving forward with the interface mockups, we have digitized the ideas for the plant care and audio tuning scenes.
The plant care scene has an empty spot for a slider interaction, a draining water meter that can be partially replenished with a button press, a rotating light source that you have to line up to the direction of your plant, a growth meter, and a variety of other less functional interface bibs and bobs.
The audio tuner scene will allow the player to tune to the right frequency in order to understand the being that has appeared at the information booth. There are three frequencies that need to be tuned into and there is color feedback for each about how close you are to the target.
Added Traffic Test and made small changes to Waldo Test
Added Waldo UI elements, but they don't resize with camera zoom yet
Mall Directory Scene Implementation
Another scene we want to have on the display interface is a directory list of all the stores in the mall and their location code. For now, the text in the scene is place holder, snagged from the directory list of an actual mall in Denver. We want to store the directory information in a text file that we can edit and pull from, so all the places and codes are being stored there, and linked into the text visual through a simple script. The location codes will reference the actual location on the mall map which is still in development. We want the crank to control the directory so you are cranking all the way up and down the list.
The waldo game UI Is now complete, and is coded to work with the knob, slider, & crank controller inputs
Pure Data Soundtrack Finished
The soundtrack for the game consists of two parts. The first was Mallsoft tracks using Ableton and the second is a generative composition created in Pure Data. Both are implemented into Unity via Pure Data. This allows the player to manipulate the music in various ways. 1. Timeshift, slowing down or speeding up the track 2. Crossfade, adjusting volume between Mallsoft and generative music. 3. Filter, changing the frequency of the sounds 4. Scale, cycling through different keys and tracks.
Twos-day Character Sketches!
Now that we are starting to get towards the main game loop, we need to start thinking about the kinds of characters that will come up to your mall info kiosk. We had previously talked about a few ideas including a mall cop segway, a stressed mom stroller, and a buff teddy bear that might attend the build-a-bear gym. Along with these more specific characters we wanted to flesh out some of the other more general ideas including furniture objects like chairs, house hold objects big and small, and a few other ideas we had been tossing around. There is still more sketching to do as far as the range of character that might appear in the mall asking for assistance, but this should provide a decent place to start
The waldo game UI Is now complete, and is coded to work with the knob, slider, & crank controller inputs
Fixed battery timer and added smoother camera motion for the Waldo game
First Character Assets!
Building on the character sketches from last week, we wanted to push a few of them to the level of actual game assets so below we have the segway mall cop, regular and on alert, a stressed chair, and the first buff teddy bear. There are still more characters to both sketch and polish, but it feels good to finally see some of the crazy characters that will be inhabiting our space mall!
Added serial compatibility to Unity
More Interface Display Graphic Mockups
The next set of interface display scenes that are moving forward in the visual design process are the music manipulation and where's waldo scenes.
The Waldo scene needed some framing and visual symmetry with the over arching space mall style, so we tried to get a sort of lense view of the store with a blueprint like background to frame the top down view of the mini-game.
The music manipulation scene gets it's visual style from the sort of retro music tech style. It made sense to mirror the physical equivalent when designing its virtual representation.
More Character Explorations!
Seeing as we probably need more objects to occupy the mall, we wanted to continue to explore the possible characters that could be in the game, as well as continue to crank out assets for them. The crowd favorite, a mom stroller with baby strollers had to be digitized, so we have that update this week. As well as another character exploration sheet and a fun set of silverware characters!
Even More Characters!
Another round of characters have come to life! Rounding out our assortment of beings in this space mall, we now have folks such as the Dad Grill, the Frog Meme Chair, the adorable Vinage Car Couple, and many more.
Wit: Great Power...
After trying out coqui for a few weeks, we tried out a new Speech to Text implementation. Facebook's Wit.io seems like a great resource, easy to implement and easy to train. But we shall see!
Window Activated!
Implemented the window kiosk overlay. We've also got the voice recognition working with wit.io, and have the whole core game loop running. Lastly, we created a spreadsheet to start filling out for all of the character interactions. Everything is coming up Space Mall!
USE MICROPHONE!
Note: for anyone who ever wants to use microphone control in their game. To make this work you need to go to Player Settings > Configuration > And literally type in "use microphone" into the "Microphone Usage Description" text field. Our work here is done.
Current version of Traffic game is confusing, will be revamping it in the next update
Traffic flow is now much easier to coordinate
Made the game a better experience to balance the different levels
Security Cam Scene + Organizational Updates
This week we added more scenes to the interface channel changer including an older mall concept piece in as a 'security cam' footage scene with an old CRT tv/scan lines effect. We may end up using the effect on more scenes but for now, we get another look into the space mall!
Other updates around keypress button choices and organizing things in the project.
Lots of changes to traffic flow, escalator direction reverse-able, can change escalator speed
Waldo UI has been completely redesigned. The camera speed is also now directly related to the zoom level
Camera speed increases as zoom level decreases
Waldo Updates and Escalator Traffic Minigame Scenes
The Waldo Minigame scene finally made it into the project, though the visuals have been added to and have changed slightly throughout the development process but here we are!
Also we have a new addition to the interface list with another minigame, this time about adjusting the traffic flow up and down floors of the mall via escalator management. It's been a little tricky to tune and get balanced but we're working on it.
Added the UI and escalator animations
Fixed an error where some UI elements weren't moving with the camera
Shifted level status indicators for better spacing
Maps and Catspiration!
The next update to the list of interface scenes includes 2 absolute bangers. First, the mall map, obvs. Which will need some context or lables to make sense in the context of the window kiosk interactions but it's great to have in there.
And secondly, the CATSPIRATION generator. Which, is in fact as great as we all imagined it would be.
ATLAS Expo 2022
And here we are! The culmination of a semester's worth of weird energy and game development. Our team got to present at the annual ATLAS Institute Expo along with dozens of other incredible people showing off their hard work and wacky projects.
We learned a lot from the showcase, mostly that people love the retro futurism vibe, and our odd little interface games.
There is definitely more work to be done if we want to continue pushing this project forward, but it really came together.
IndieCade Nomination
TIKATMOS was nominated for IndieCade!
We are so excited to have TIKATMOS at IndieCade 2022! More updates to the game coming soon!
Wishing Fountain Scene
One update from the refinment pass we are taking on the game is to change from the old pong game to a similar but different idea - granting and denying the wishes that come through the coins tossed in the mall's various fountains.
This is still a concept being tested and a final graphics pass should help link this game in with the other interface screens, but conecptually we are very excited about it.
Alien Font Update
Just an alien font, for all your alien font needs!
Below the new font can be seen implemented across a few different interface scenes, adding the additional task of 'translating' the written text to be able to read it inside the game.
We didn't want the font to be too difficult to approach, with fun shapes combining to create letter forms similar to the latin alphabet equivalent, but it does a lot to bring the overall aesthetic of the game further into that retro-futuristic look that we have been going for.
If you'd like to download the font for your own alien needs, check it out inside the project files!
Standby Scene
With the addition of the new font, we decided it was probably high time to update that old classic standby screen to something a little more custom. It also involves more animations that really bring the interface screen to life.
Wishing Fountain Graphics Pass
As promised, an updated graphics pass on the Wishing Fountain Scene, with added sparkle particles!
New Characters Implementation
Adding in more characters has always been a goal but this time, we got in a whole new set! Each arc of the game might have new characters, returning ones, or multiple paths for you to help them down. It's up to you, the fearless information kiosk helper to do your best to assist all patrons of the Mall of Space.
New Knobs!
With final touches, comes the new and improved playful kiosk knobs!
IndieCade - Beyond the Screen Interview!
And we did it! The TIKATMOS interview is live on twitch! Feel free to check that out and see our lovely faces talk about our weird and wonderful creation!
And a huge thanks to IndieCade and the Beyond the Screens team for having us on the show!
IndieCade - Live Action Award Winner!
We really did it this time! TIKATMOS is proud to have been awarded the Live Action Award from IndieCade 2022! Thanks so much to everyone who played, reviewed and watched our interview!! It's been an amazing ride and the whole team is stoked to have been able to be a part of this years awards!
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