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S01E17: Glossing up Galaxy's Edge, Part One
39 Plays1 year ago
Let's continue the "Star Wars at the Parks" series as we visit with game designer Joe Mares, who helped design some of the early prototypes that led to the interactive "gameplay" at Star Wars Galaxy's Edge. What do you need to keep in mind when you're creating something like this? It's more complicated than you think! Recorded live on location at Knott's Berry Farm (for reasons which will become clear...)
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Transcript
Immersive Experience vs. Reality at Star Wars Galaxy's Edge
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome back to the Star Wars cleaning crew and back to our Star Wars and the Disney Parks series. Now today, I really want to dive into talking about Star Wars Galaxy's Edge and kind of what was promised versus what really was delivered. So when they first started talking about the land, it was going to be completely immersive, completely in universe. And they were saying things like you could live your Star Wars adventure. You could do whatever you wanted to do. Did we get that? Not really. You know, what what we got was occasional interactions with a very few number of characters. They were first talking about the world just being completely populated with different characters, characters we knew and new characters.
00:00:53
Speaker
And really, you know, we just got a few different characters. Usually they're swamped with people who want to take selfies with them. So, you know, you didn't quite get what you were trying to do there.
Star Wars Data Pad and Magic Bands: Repetitive Interactions?
00:01:04
Speaker
And then we got this app, the Disney Play app, which has been around for a while. It's designed to give people something to do while you're waiting in line for rides. But on the Disney Play app, they created a Star Wars data pad that would drive your experience if you wanted to have a storytelling, interactive experience at Star Wars Galaxy's Edge. And you could take on missions either for the first order or for the resistance. And it would say something like, go over to this area and scan all these crates and find the crate we're looking for.
00:01:35
Speaker
and you do that or maybe you're you're hacking a robot you're hacking a droid or you're you're trying to tune into a radio signal or something like that but it's all canned it's all predetermined after you've done a couple of these you're kind of eh it's not really that interesting same thing with what they added later which was called the Batu bounty hunters this is something that used the magic bands that you wore on your wrist And with the magic bands and with using the app, you could get assigned a mission to track down a bounty. You would walk up to different doors in the land. And if you were on the right track, your magic band would, uh, would blink happy colors and you know give you positive feedback. If you were going the wrong way, it would do negative colors like red, and you would go in the wrong way. Eventually you would find the one you want. You scan it. Hooray. You've got the bounty.
00:02:30
Speaker
You go back and you cash it in. And after you've done like 20 of these, you're a grand bounty master. But by that time you might be bored. It is not really what we wanted to see happen.
Interactive Inspiration: Frontierland and Galaxy's Edge
00:02:41
Speaker
Well, here's the thing is when they first started talking about this level of interactivity, this, this level of role play. that they wanted to support in the land. They piloted it in Frontierland with a game experience, whatever you want to call it, called the Legends of Frontierland. And, you know, they tried that for a couple of years. They learned what they wanted to do. They kind of wound up going in a different direction with Galaxy's Edge. But the core of that gameplay from Legends of Frontierland, they took over to Knott's Berry Farm, which has a western section called Ghost Town.
00:03:20
Speaker
and they turned it into an interactive experience called Ghost Town Alive. Okay, so you with me so far?
Achieving Potential: Ghost Town Alive vs. Galaxy's Edge
00:03:28
Speaker
Alright, so if you want to experience what Galaxy's Edge might have been, The thing to do is to go to Knott's Berry Farm and play Ghost Town Alive and imagine that you are in Star Wars instead of in Ancient West. Okay, so recently I took my friend Joe Morris. He is a guy that I have worked with on the past. We worked on a couple of interactive learning experiences together. He's a game designer by trade. I took him with me to Knott's Berry Farm. We spent a morning
00:04:03
Speaker
playing Ghost Town Alive, and then we talked about it for a while, and I wanna spend the rest of this episode playing parts of our conversation. You're gonna see why in just a second. But let me just say this before we go.
Live Recording Insights with Joe Morris
00:04:19
Speaker
This is the first time that I ever recorded one of these podcasts live on location, yeah and we're in a theme park, so you're gonna hear the occasional whistle of a train, the occasional horse-winnying, kids running around, ah but but you'll be able to hear the dialogue pretty well. So let me pass it over to me with an explanation of why it was that I brought my friend Joe and the whole origins of this conversation. So Bob, here's to you. Well, we we we kind of started this whole idea when we were at Disneyland together and I was telling you guys how Disney had piloted the interaction at Galaxy's Edge with the thing that they did at Frontierland and you were like, oh yeah, I designed that.
00:05:03
Speaker
And I think my mind my mind blew up. you know Actually, I remember specifically because we were we were sitting on the Millennium Falcon when that happened. And I was like, what? So maybe start there. Tell us that story. How did how did you get pulled into that? And you know do I have that story right? Yeah. so um i So a friend of mine reached out to someone who is in charge of Imagineering. I don't remember his exact title. At the time, he just reached out to him on LinkedIn and said, like, hey, we're a couple of game designers and we want to do something for Imagineering. And I didn't even know he did that.
00:05:41
Speaker
And like a week or two later, he's like, he's like hey, we got a gig consulting for Imagineering. I was like, we do? And so that was always been my dream, is I always wanted to work for Imagineering, but it's really hard to get it. Like, it's notoriously hard. And so, but I had been a game designer for a while, and I was really, and I really wanted to to do something for Imagineering, so I got pulled into
Designing Interactive Experiences: Balancing Freedom and Guidance
00:06:06
Speaker
that project. And originally it wasn't, It wasn't um ah like a completely like interact like what it is now where it's like automated storytelling and all that. Right. It was a they had like a notion of an idea and they wanted the guests to be able to go into the park and do whatever they wanted. And as a game designer, um you want to give the illusion that someone can do whatever they want. You don't want them to actually be able to. Right. Yeah.
00:06:38
Speaker
And so that was the first thing that I had to make them aware of is that um you want them to feel like they could do whatever they want, but we we need very real rails here yeah that people can be guided on to make sure that they have a good time, but also to make sure, make it feel like they have autonomy and they're able to do whatever they want, just what they're trying to do. So part of the funny part was they originally some tests that they were telling me about that they did before is like a year or something prior to to me joining and was they sort of made like an escape room type experience oh and they brought in people from the park to come try it out and the host of the experience he introduced the concept
00:07:22
Speaker
i So he blew his top. no yeah no he So he introduced the ah the concept of the room and he said, a few people are going to come in and they're going to tell you different versions of the story. Don't trust anyone, you know, but you're trying to figure out this mystery. And so the guests in the experiments, he was about to leave and they stopped him from leaving because he said, Don't trust anybody. Yeah. Yeah. They said don't trust anybody. And so they they held him there in the room and they closed the door. And so he was stuck there for like an hour. And he was like, no, no, really, I like this is and they're like, no, we don't trust you. They're like, it's like you read a safe word or something. yeah Yeah. And so I think I think they didn't want to get stuck in in something like that. And also escape rooms that they don't have like a huge um um what's that called?
00:08:15
Speaker
a pass-through rate. Oh, I forgot the name of it. Oh, like a turn rate, turnover. yeah Yeah, it doesn't have a really good throughput. Yeah, it doesn't have a really good
Walt Disney's Vision of Guided Exploration
00:08:25
Speaker
throughput. Yeah. So I think they wanted to create something with, they have a lot of land that they're not, you know, people are just waiting for rides. So they want to do something with that land and they wanted people to have autonomy. And so the pitch pitch was, um The pitch was they wanted people to do whatever they wanted. And so the the main thing I focused on was we need to systemize this in a way where people can always have a good time, but people need to know what the next step is. yeah Because clarity is the first rule of fun. So if they don't understand what's going on or what they is expected of them, they're not going to
00:09:03
Speaker
they're probably just going to walk away. you know sure And so we made a system where there are certain touch points, there's like a certain thing that you start off knowing. um I think they originally they were doing like a very complicated, and in my opinion, a complicated system where the actors would be updated with all this information on all the activities that the user was doing. But that puts like a lot of stress on the actor to keep all these things in mind. Yeah. And so so we were we were developing a system that was more controlled um so people can have like a little more controlled experience because my thing is I always go back to like Walt Disney himself. Yeah. So whatever Disney does is fine. But I always look at Walt Disney is the company. right Yeah. Yeah. Whatever Disney the company does is is
00:09:57
Speaker
um I don't want to say relevant, but it's it's to me, the guiding light is always like walt Walt Disney. and Walt Disney actually designed Disneyland with autonomy in mind. He wanted you to feel like you can go anywhere, but he was very much guiding you. right like He had the weenies, we like the castle, the mountains and all that stuff. We should probably clarify the term weenie. You and I know what we're talking about. Other people are like, Walt Disney and Weenies? But that's what he called the things like the castle or the Matterhorn, the big landmarks you could see from anywhere that would draw people in. Yeah. And that's how he kind of got you to move from one place to another. Yeah, because at the time, in order to get like an animal to move where they wanted to, like they would hang a weenie like in front of a donkey. Right. And then the donkey would try to get the weenie and then thus he's going where you want him to. And so
00:10:45
Speaker
So that's what he did. he he he He had selected paths that he wanted to go through that for you to discover. And I use the the air yeah finger quotes. and But because when Disneyland opened, um because kids saw these commercials where you can do anything you wanted, yeah kids started crawling all over like the frontier line, the gates and all that, because they thought they could go anywhere. yeah Well, there's an infamous story about Walt being in his apartment over the firehouse. Have you ever heard this? And all of a sudden he looks over and there's a little kid climbing up the fire pole into his apartment and he's like, get out of here. And the next day they boarded it up and it's been boarded up ever since. That's funny. Yeah. Yeah, so so you need you need rails um to ensure fun, but also to ensure safety and also because you can give people complete autonomy because they may do illegal things. Yeah, right. So yeah, that's how that got
Complexity of Interactive vs. Linear Storytelling
00:11:42
Speaker
started. So I know like when they when they first started talking about what the Galaxy's Edge experience would be like, one of the things that they mentioned was you could have
00:11:51
Speaker
You could have the experience where you're flying the Millennium Falcon. You do a very poor job of it. You wind up banging up the ship. And then you go into the Cantina and a bounty hunter comes in and is like, hey, you just crashed up that ship over there. You owe me money or something like that. Like that type of experience. That sounded like an amazing dream. yeah You know, like that would be so cool at the moment. But it didn't come to pass. And I think a lot of it is from what you were saying. Like, how do you create that for everybody? how You just can't do that where it's quite that um off the rails. Yeah, I think a part of that comes from because I had also worked for I just I designed Jurassic World VR Expedition at David Busters. And there there was like a lot of movie guys.
00:12:39
Speaker
working on it. And I think movie and TV people, more linear storytellers, yeah are used to saying, you're going to experience this in this way. And the difference between interactive, it's subtle but important, is that um you don't get to dictate how someone experiences it. You have to make sure that the world is cohesive enough that they still make discoveries, yeah but they'll do it at their own pace. And that's a very important difference because games are scalable, like everyone can play it and everyone can have their own unique experience, but you're not telling them this, then this, then this, then this, you're letting them do it on their own. And that's exactly what happened with what happened at Jurassic World, is they wanted, it's a motion vehicle ride with four people, and they wanted the ride to stop, and then Blue jumps in front of you. The Velociraptor, yeah. The Velociraptor Blue, he jumps in front of you, and then the director, he said, player four is gonna try to shoot him with a gun, but then it's gonna jam. Player three is gonna grab a flare gun and shoot it in the air, and it's that same line of thinking of you don't dictate what you're for. Yeah, you can't control what they're gonna do. Yeah, exactly. So you have to make the environment fertile enough to foster these discoveries, but you can't dictate the discoveries when it's interactive. Yeah, it's a thing that I know they had been testing for a long time, because I had designed this
00:14:04
Speaker
the base for the whole experience back in 2012, I think. okay And it didn't, the Legends of Frontier line didn't release until 2014, I think. So they had been playing with it a lot yeah in that time in between. And then from what I know from other Imagineers is that was the base for the the interactions of Star Wars Land. And then I think there's a Marvel experience, Avengers experience or something too. OK, we're going to pause it right there and we're going to come back to this next week. But if you're into this, your homework for this week is to think about this. How do you as a designer, as a theme park designer, how do you balance the need to have people be on rails to keep them within the realms of what is safe or legal or scalable and also giving them the experience of feeling like they can do anything they want?
00:14:59
Speaker
Disney wound up taking one path with Galaxy's Edge. There are other paths you can take. We're going to explore that more next week. Thanks to Joe Morris for being with me. We'll talk with Joe Moore over the next week or so. In the meantime, keep your kitchens clean. May the force be with you. We'll see you next week. Bye bye.
00:15:28
Speaker
Oh, yeah!