Imagine if you will, a world not too dissimilar to our own. A world where famous regional theme park Busch Gardens Williamsburg is concerned about its appearance and theming. To set the stage for this concept, we look at how wildly popular theme parks use technology to generate merch sales and to keep guests busy. From wands at Universal and Sesame Street to droids at Galaxy's Edge. Additionally, parks have used mobile phone games to try to engage guests as well, such as the games at various Cedar Fair parks. My concept is simple, create a game that uses physical items to interact with the park that takes advantage of the park's themes and to sell merch.
The basic setup for the game is more simple than the actual execution, but it borrows a bit from everything I've mentioned above. The game has players travel to various points of interest in the areas, once they scan their object, they have a chance to complete a simple task like press buttons in an order like in Simon or something along those lines. The difficulty of the tasks can be adjusted to provide regulars a challenge if they're constantly at the park playing as this system could be linked to a database that keeps track of how many times this item plays the game. For the sake of description, let's call these points "Magic Wells".
There is also a competitive faction system based around the main attractions of the parks. Let's say that two teams are "Scottish Serpents" and "Mountain Beasts". Each team has their own token you can buy to represent a faction of their choice to play at the wells that represent each team. For example, "Serpent's Scale" or "Frozen Tooth". The competitive nature of this comes down to how many wells are unlocked by each faction on any day. The park could even go one step further and do something akin to Harry Potter where at the end of the year, the park has a big celebration themed to the winning faction with special ride time on the winning ride and exclusive food. This all of course could all be tracked and displayed on an app for displaying stats.
I think this would be pretty unique thing for parks to do as it mixed a real competitive element with an interactive experience at the park. Cedar Fair's games were cool, but offered little outside of some trivia, AR stuff, and basic mini games. Disney and Universal's offerings are neat, but do little outside of "make thing do something". This would be a way to interact with the park while giving people more of a reason to actually interact with it.
So yeah, that's my first concept in forever.
Disclaimer: I love how Uni and WDW have interactive elements and don't mean to trash them as I'm afraid I did in the concept. I still get death threats over the Figment joke I made.
The basic setup for the game is more simple than the actual execution, but it borrows a bit from everything I've mentioned above. The game has players travel to various points of interest in the areas, once they scan their object, they have a chance to complete a simple task like press buttons in an order like in Simon or something along those lines. The difficulty of the tasks can be adjusted to provide regulars a challenge if they're constantly at the park playing as this system could be linked to a database that keeps track of how many times this item plays the game. For the sake of description, let's call these points "Magic Wells".
There is also a competitive faction system based around the main attractions of the parks. Let's say that two teams are "Scottish Serpents" and "Mountain Beasts". Each team has their own token you can buy to represent a faction of their choice to play at the wells that represent each team. For example, "Serpent's Scale" or "Frozen Tooth". The competitive nature of this comes down to how many wells are unlocked by each faction on any day. The park could even go one step further and do something akin to Harry Potter where at the end of the year, the park has a big celebration themed to the winning faction with special ride time on the winning ride and exclusive food. This all of course could all be tracked and displayed on an app for displaying stats.
I think this would be pretty unique thing for parks to do as it mixed a real competitive element with an interactive experience at the park. Cedar Fair's games were cool, but offered little outside of some trivia, AR stuff, and basic mini games. Disney and Universal's offerings are neat, but do little outside of "make thing do something". This would be a way to interact with the park while giving people more of a reason to actually interact with it.
So yeah, that's my first concept in forever.
Disclaimer: I love how Uni and WDW have interactive elements and don't mean to trash them as I'm afraid I did in the concept. I still get death threats over the Figment joke I made.
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