BYTON Space Explorer

Digital entertainment, specifically gaming, will play a major role in self-driving vehicles once autonomous driving reaches a certain level. The BYTON M-Byte with it’s many screens offers a perfect environment for multi-player experiences, keeping all passengers entertained on long rides or while charging on the road.

To demonstrate the M-Byte’s gaming capabilities, I was tasked to create a short interactive experience for up to four players. Based on a commercial BYTON has released in 2018, I developed the idea of a journey into space, with the M-Byte representing a spaceship and it’s passengers taking on different positions of a crew, like captain, navigator and engineer. The goal was to create a collaborative environment, encouraging the team to communicate and truly master the different challenges they would be facing on the journey together as a team.

The game was developed In cooperation with Berlin based design agency Exozet. I’ve developed the storyline and most of the mini game mechanics, art directed the whole experience and created all music and sound effects.

Art Direction

Since the game was meant to be a proof of concept to showcase the gaming capabilities of the BYTON M-Byte, the running length was limited in order to easily demonstrate it at vehicle demos or trade shows. Therefore it was important to capture the essence of such a gaming experience and make it an entertaining, action-packed ride. I've started with outlining the emotional journey I've had in mind and used the resulting timeline as a framework for arranging the several mini challenges.

The game features two larger segments dedicated to a more action orientated gameplay, like shooting and dodging asteroids or calibrating the shield in defense of space debris. In addition to that there are dedicated launch and arrival routines, that require triggering certain sequences of operations. The goal was to emphasize user touch interaction with custom, very futuristic looking control panels, which are so common for science fiction games and movies.

I've designed a total of ten UI mini-games and arranged them in clusters of two or three on the different screens, so that each crew member was responsible for individual operations. When playing the game, the captain in the driver's seat would call out commands to the different stations, which need to be executed as quickly as possible for maximum scoring. Each team can pick a name created by a random name generator and the final score would be displayed as part of a high score list.

The focus on collaborative game mechanics paired with the very immersive, futuristic setting was designed for maximum fun and engagement within a very short amount of time and has proven to be an exciting addition to the many possibilities the M-Byte has to offer and in many cases turned out to be the ultimate highlight of shows and demos.

First style frame Center Console
Wireframe Center Console
UI Layout (design: Hervé Cecchi)
Wireframe of rear seat UI
Rear seat UI Layout (design: Hervé Cecchi)
Final UI for crew selection screen
Early UI for the main display
Static Hyperspeed layout
Layout animation for Hyperspeed

Intro Animation

I wanted to set the right mood from the beginning on to quickly and fully immerse the passengers into the spaceship scenario. The game starts with a bang, a beautiful journey through our solar system, accompanied by cinematic music. Since I’ve created the animation and soundtrack myself, I was able to perfectly match the timing of the one-shot camera move to the music, by going back and forth between my 3D animation software and the musical composition.

The music and sound design of Space Explorer

Designing an immersive experience requires a holistic approach. All the different components need to fit perfectly together to create a believable world.
Especially the musical soundtrack for such a unique experience cannot simply be aquired, it demands to be tailored to fit the length and emotional quality of the individual parts of the experience.
From the beginning on I envisioned a very cinematic, heroic soundtrack, reminescent of classic 70s soundtracks from the likes of John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith. While I have created music for games before, I wouldn’t call myself a professional composer. But I wanted to accept this challenge and see where it would take me.
Early tests with precomposed orchestra libraries sounded promising, but were missing the degree of freedom needed for full expressiveness and articulation. I decided to dig deeper into cinematic composition and eventually wrote all the musical pieces on my own.

Regarding the use of sound effects, commercially available stock sound effects would have been an option, but many of those sound quite common and heavily lean on the superb sound engineering developed for blockbuster movies like STAR WARS. And even though certain expections for typical “Sci-Fi” sounds need to be addressed, hand-crafted sounds contribute to a much richer experience. All sounds in the game are generated with virtual synthesizers from the core up. Although there’s tons of preinstalled presets to choose from, I dug deep into sound synthesis for full control of the desired effects. And designing your own laser blast sound is so much more rewarding than simply using a standard stock asset.

Have a listen: