THE PADDINGTON BEAR EXPERIENCE

About

Based on the recent Paddington Bear movies, this attraction allowed the audience to experience the familiar locations and characters of the Brown family, as they prepared for “Marmalade Day”.

Summary

We were originally contracted on this project to deliver the technical integration for a few individual games, but as the development process progressed we ended up providing custom show control tools to run the operation of the entire experience, as more and more unique requirements were discovered. We also took on the gameplay and interaction design role.

The System

Tracking Groups

The first request was for a dashboard display that could indicate where different audience groups were as they passed along the linear track of rooms. By using COGS’ customisable dashboard feature, we were able to take cues from the technical system specified to trigger the lights and sound in the linear experience and represent them in a way that was much easier for an operator to understand and control by seeing at a glance what state each room of the experience was in, rather than having to decode the original cue stack.

Scheduling

This led on to creating an entire show timetabling system to manage the complexities of timetabling and running a day’s worth of multiple show entries. The attraction needed to be as high capacity as possible, with A+B groups entering every 7.5 minutes along a track that split into a double then back to a single lane, without the groups ever colliding.

It was clear that although the technical system specified to run the hour-long experience itself was capable of running a linear timeline of cues for each individual room, it was unable to dynamically handle automating the audience entry control that started each ‘pulse’ going. Through COGS, we provided a “scheduler” that could start show entries depending on the time of day, and would allow the operators to build a timetable of shows for the day, and giving them tools to set whether or not an entry should be a ‘ghost pulse’ (an empty entry to allow for resetting and staff breaks) or not, both at the start of a day and also dynamically throughout the day.

Flow Control

Our system could also handle any unforeseen issues that occurred as each group pulse moved through the track while still keeping the show running, using a dynamic show pausing system.

We built tools that allowed the show operators to pause the experience in specific rooms, with the system automatically pausing any rooms ‘upstream’ of that location while allowing those ‘downstream’ to continue uninterrupted. The show could then be resumed to pick up from exactly where it left off. The system would automatically record any delays accumulated on a show pause, and would automatically shift back the rest of the entries in the day to accommodate that delay, to prevent audience groups clashing with one another. It could even automatically make up any delays on any subsequent ghost pulses, to make up the time, automatically bringing any entries later in the day back on schedule.

“In World” Integration

This was all translated into the attraction’s Paddington Station set, where the audience starts their experience. The set featured a number of departure boards showing the start times of each group, displayed as if they were train departure times. The appropriate station announcements were dynamically fired depending on what was happening in the experience - very akin to a real railway station system!

The screen content for these screens was originally quoted on by another studio, but we managed to deliver it for a fraction of their costs, due to the fact that we can create custom screen content in house and easily build it on top of the existing COGS show control system. All the information about what shows were starting when was already there inside COGS, so creating a display to show that to audiences in a way that looked like a train station departure board was relatively straightforward!

Game & Puzzle Design

We were also approached by The Path to fill the role of game designer on this project, drawing on our previous gaming experience. The role was a late addition to the project’s creative team, to complement the work of the Director and Set and Props Designer by bringing in specific game design expertise. We brought in our regular associate David Middleton (Rebel Brain) to review the creative ideas up to that point, draw everything game- and interaction-related together, and produce game design documentation that was both creative and technical. He fulfilled his role as department head throughout production, working closely with the IP holders, talking with other heads of department and attending dress and technical rehearsals. This allowed us to take care of interactive elements in the project end-to-end: design, fabrication, testing, alterations and final fix.

Conclusion

This was a project that started small for us and ended up becoming a large multi-faceted scope, mainly due to the discoveries of what the show needed over the course of the evolving production process. By being on board from the start we were able to meet these demands and pivot quickly, creating and deploying solutions as required, ultimately allowing a large and complex attraction to operate seamlessly and intuitively.