The Game: Chimp Chat was created for the Jane Goodall Institute and adapted for the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund as Gorilla Chat. This interactive experience tasks players with mimicking chimpanzee vocalizations to learn more about them and their behaviors. A second monitor displays a digital chimpanzee who will react to your performance.

My Role: I was the lead designer on this project. I was responsible for the UX/systems design and programming. After coordinating with internal graphic designers I created flow charts and a game design document with deliverables highlighted to clients. From there work inside Unity began.

Vocal Recognition: The “vocal recognition” element was able to be kept pretty simple for our needs. I was able to detect spikes in volume as syllables, equivalent to a hoot or growl from a chimpanzee. If the volume spikes aligned with the spikes from the reference vocalizations within a configurable margin of error the player passed.

UX/Systems Design: Guests at the exhibit would be able to walk up and play this game at any time. The UI had to be intuitive so that any one would be able to play. To facilitate this we used large buttons with clear iconography. The game also had to be responsive to the chaotic environment of a location based experience where players could come upon the game at any point. I included timed resets and another clearly labeled button to restart the game from any point.

Responsibilities

• Leading our interactive and art teams to create the entire experience

• Scheduling for milestones and client deliverables as well as creating the game design documents

• Designing and programming an intuitive and reliable user experience

• Research and development of a simple vocal recognition software

• Implementing animations of a digital character into a Unity animator and programmatically calling animation states

• Quality assurance testing the game to deliver a bug free experience

• Setting up the on-site hardware and creating a detailed setup and maintenance document for the crew