aaron vanderbeek

Campaign Trail was created as part of the Building Virtual Worlds class at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The platform for this virtual world is called The Beyond Question Remote System, in which you have each member of an audience interacting with the game via a Beyond Question remote. Our game was designed to handle 120 remotes (120 players) at a single time and was designed and implemented in five days.

In Campaign Trail we split the audience into two teams by having each player chooses their party affiliation with the remote. The goal of the game is to win the presidential election via 'campaigning', ie travelling through states and claiming stars within those states. Each party has a single avatar that is controlled collectively by each person in that party. Players use the arrow keys on the Beyond Question remotes to tell their candidate where to go and the first person to reach a majority wins the election! Check out the video for an in game tutorial and to see the game played.

While part of the inspiration for this theme was likely due to the proximity of the pending presidential election, we tried as much as possible to generalize the experience such that it would be relevent during later presidential elections as well. To do this we used more generalized art, using the donkey and elephant to represent the parties and avoided using candidate humor that would only be relevent for this election. We did end up using soundbytes spoken by Obama and McCain ("change" and "progress" respectively) to indicate when a star was collected, but really any voices would have worked there since their main purpose was to satirize the way politicians say the same thing over and over on the campaign trail.

Our initial design of this game had the parties claiming surface area within the state, and that securing the majority of the area claimed the state for that party. We quickly moved away from this and toward the use of collecting stars after discussing the technical issues of drawing a path along the screen and dealing with surface areas of very complex shapes. By using stars we were able to link specific stars to specific states and just place the stars on that state on the map, a very simple implementation. Plus stars fit the theme really well!

One important distinction we ended up making was that we based the majority on number of stars collected (stars only get collected when an entire state is claimed, and all of those stars get collected by that candidate), rather than on the electoral vote system. We found that when using the electoral vote system that it was always a race for the northeast, with many of the larger states having no real incentive of being claimed. While the electoral vote system would be a better representation of real life we opted to eliminate the 'race for the northeast' to allow the players to travel in any direction and have a chance at winning. This way, the larger states like Montana, Texas, and California are worth the most.

Finally we went back and forth on the idea of letting parties claim stars that have already been claimed by another party. We ended up deciding to not let stars be reclaimed for a few reasons: 1. Having reclaimable stars introduces the dominant strategy of just following the other player. 2. The game length would be significantly longer when stars are constantly being reclaimed. 3. Having the stars get removed from the map as they are claimed was a great way to narrow the focus as the game progressed and allowed for really great race situations that spiked our interest curve at the end of our experience.

Game Designer: Came up with and presented concepts for mechanic and theme to teammates, placed all stars individually on the map, maintained design vision throughout development.

Producer: Scheduled meetings, presented work to teachers and classmates, and managed assets.

Sound Designer: Recorded voice overs, found and edited sounds, and selected music.