• RWS Drone Game

Predictive Maintenance at your fingertips

Are you curious what Predictive Maintenance is, involves and what it means for the future of Rijkswaterstaat? This 10 minute sandbox lets you experience first hand what the answers to the above questions are.

Created as a playable future vision, it allows players to engage with a virtual environment where everything is measured, all data is consolidated centrally and made available to whomever needs it. In this way, players experience exactly why this program at RWS is so important to help manage our assets intelligently and keep critical infrastructure in top condition.

  • Client

    LEF Future Center
    Rijkswaterstaat
    2018

  • Deliverables

    Portable PC version
    180° Dome-screen fixed installation

  • Roles

    Project lead
    Design
    Development (Unity/C#)

Trailer

Design

Fly a drone

Players navigate the game's environment using a drone, controlled either by flightstick or gamepad. Using a highly developed control scheme, almost anyone can control the drone successfully while accentuating what makes flying a drone fun.

Find, scan and investigate data

Follow sensor networks, review mechanical data, measure structural dimensions and use special view modes to identify the key pieces of data you need to complete your mission. Players are given a realistic toolset presented in a futuristic way to navigate the challenges ahead.

Complete scenario missions

The game features several missions, each for a different real-world stakeholder or dimension of Predictive Maintenance. Through dialogue and tasks, players are taken on a journey through the practical applications.

Process and features

The RWS Drone Game was developed under high time pressure for an upcoming event where it was a central part of Rijkswaterstaat's presence. Design, development and delivery took 8 weeks from start to finish.

Focus

With little time - both for players and development - it was crucial that the core concept and mechanics were strong, simple and well executed.

Wow-factor

Among countless cookie cutter or off-the-shelf videos and experiences at events like these, the Drone Game had to stand out and draw spectators in. It had to present Rijkswaterstaat in a positive, innovative and qualitative light.

Accessibility

Many players would not be gamers, nor will many play this game more than once. A custom and highly iterated control scheme allows anyone to experience the thrill of flying a drone without the frustration.



Control scheme

To begin, a test environment was created featuring a "fly through the hoops" course. The hoops were placed at various heights and various orientations to try out a wide scale of different flying and navigation challenges.

Using this test environment a wide range of different drone control setups was tested, from realistic to simplified, complete stabilization to none at all, momentum-based or path-constrained, first-person-shooter-like or even single-stick.

Every iteration was tested using both seasoned gamers, experienced drone fliers and complete newbies to either.


Level design

Once a suitable control model had been found, testing focused on movement challenges that were both fun to perform and achievable for beginners. This set of maneuvers (fly under something, hover above surface, fly sideways along wall, circle an object, etc) led to the initial level design.

The curved layout was chosen to minimize art workload and cram as much content into as little space as possible - thereby minimizing downtime where players just had to fly straight to their target.

The level design process involved grey-boxing the geometry for the 3d artist, evaluating and playtesting their output and using overpaints and updated greyboxes to bring the environment to its final state.


Data and sensors

Players needed objectives in the game world, data to gather and sensors to scan. The basic setup (derived from the earlier playtesting) is for players to find a data hub, follow the lines to its connected sensors and scan them.

This incentivizes players to explore the environment and try to figure out how it works and how everything is connected, while offering fun navigation challenges in the process.

To give the dry nature of data some flair, the scanning UI was given a considerable amount of visual polish and animation. Even if the look and feel are sci-fi, the subject matter is true to life.

Two different view modes expose Structural Data and Sensor Data, as well as giving players the ability to look inside the infrastructure physically.