Stephen Fry: Gadget Man

On a misty evening in late November, Stephen Fry and his Gadget Man team joined forces with game designers Running in the Halls and projection mapping experts Blitz Communications to create a game that would be seen – and hopefully heard – all around Londons docklands. Their goal was to turn the north face of the disused Millennium Mill into a giant video game screen, and invite members of the public to stop by and play a projection-mapped demolition game on an epic scale.

Running in the Halls Iman Moradi shares with us some of the secrets behind the making of the game.

"We were tasked with coming up with a game that could be played on the side of a building - this idea had us intrigued. Not one to shy away from complexity, we came up with several ideas of the types of crowd games we could create in the short time we had.

But, we had a couple of other challenges to surmount. Most of them had to do with the kind of technologies that wed be using to make the game happen – obviously one area we want to completely wanted to leave to the specialists was the projection part.

Specialist company Blitz Communications joined us as project partners to provide the game with over 120,000 Lumens of projecting power ready to blast hot photons onto the face of a chosen building.

In fact, the building choice was only finalised late in the project (such is the way with pending permissions) and we had to keep certain things very flexible, and completely adaptable to circumstance. The Millennium Mill was actually the third building we discussed this with. As you can imagine, we were very relieved when they finally agreed to the project a little more than a week away from filming!

Regardless of the game mechanics and everything else that was going on at the early stage of the project, we developed a neat circuit like visual design language, sympathetic to the overall theme of the show. Conceptually speaking, we were thinking, the players would be uncovering the circuitry underlying the facade of the building, by destroying it.

From a visual design specification standpoint we made it so it could wrap around the features of pretty much any building with standard architectural features such as windows, window frames, dividing spaces, decorative columns. While bearing in mind the limited space available to project onto, we wanted to stay as far away from the usual tropes of projection mapping which include faux shadows, excessive animation, lighting effects and playing with negative space. Our objective was to make our graphics both distinctive and legible.

Needless to say, even though we had a projector to experiment with - albeit nothing like 6x projectors we used on the day, each about 40 times more powerful than a home cinema projector - we kept tweaking the visuals and in particular the animation effects till the final test day.

The requirement for the game was that a crowd of people could connect to play the game using their phones, with minimal instruction and setting up. Given the time constraints, to bypass the App store and Google Play was imperative, we wanted to be able to test and tweak the gamers experience until the last minute and so we created a very usable HTML5 browser based interface for a game that could be played on any smartphone. Because the game was team based, we had to ensure that every player could view what their teammates were doing on their own phone, in real time. To achieve this we used the brilliant Node.js to create a socket server, which each player connected to through their instance of the game. This node server is essentially what made the real time interaction possible.

Every client connection to the game fed directly to a server we had set up, where a database collected all the game actions. The game logic itself was all done on the server. The results of each player's actions in the game were in turn fed directly to two computers  in this case, NVIDIA powered MSI and Alienware laptops - running an instance of the Unity game engine for each side of the building. The extra graphics processing provided by the laptops gave us a comfortable safety net.

To say Unity is built for fast prototyping is an absolute understatement, in the right hands, it's an absolute force to be reckoned with. We'd actually previously used it for a brief put to us to create a series of games for a well known national brand in record time (sadly under NDA, but they're delicious!), and some of our research and development work is built upon pushing the Unity platform to do unexpected things.

One of the things we could do with Unity was simulate the physics of crumbling, and the special effects such as sparks and explosions. Unity essentially took the game logic from the server, and displayed the corresponding visuals, the code was abstracted enough to work on each side of the building with a few minor variables being changed.

The rest, of course, is history. Needless to say the system held up while Stephen and 15 other game players took to Demolition like ducks to water. And luckily for our projection, the weather held up - just. Any mistier and we'd have had a problem on our hands.

And, we're proud to say it was the most hi-tech thing to happen at the Mill since Jean Michel-Jarre played a gig there in 1988. That's quite an accolade!"

You can find out more about Running In The Halls and their work over at www.rith.co.uk.

All images courtesy of Running In The Halls.