The Dark Ride

Five Nights at Freddy's - The Dark Ride is a multiplayer 4.5 minute long 4D Dark Ride based on the "Five Nights at Freddy's" IP in a CAVE environment collaborate with a series of hardware.

Role: Experience Designer/ Animator

Timeline: Aug.2023 - Dec. 2023

Five Nights at Freddy's - The Dark Ride is a 4.5-minute 4D experience inspired by the "Five Nights at Freddy's" franchise, set in a CAVE environment. It features a pneumatic motion base floor, haptic vests, fans, DMX lighting, and immersive sound. A multidisciplinary team of 3 brings this dark ride from concept to development, culminating in a showcase at the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center Fall Festival. Over 130 riders and hundreds of observers experienced the ride during the 4-hour event.

Experience Name: The Dark Ride - Five Nights at Freddy's

Set: Entertainment Technology Center Cave

Demographics: Guests of ETC festival

Length: 4 minutes

Inspiration

With the upcoming release of the Freddy’s movie, we were inspired to create a dark ride based on its story. To ensure that even guests unfamiliar with the IP could appreciate its charm in a short time, we set the scene in Freddy’s pizzeria. To make the story easy to understand and immersive, we cast the guests as night guards entering the narrative. The guests will meet the main characters of FNAF during the experience, building up their interest towards the IP.

Physical Setting

We facilitate the experience in The CAVE(Cave automatic virtual environment) room in CMU ETC building. To enhance the experience, we collaborate multiple hardware including immersive sound system, DMX lighting system, pneumatic motion based floor, fans and haptic vests.

Virtual Setting

Based on the Storyline and Experience Flow we designed the virtual setting based on the premade dark ride track.

Challenges & Solutions

• Scope Control & Skillset

  Our goal was to complete a full-length experience lasting over four minutes within one semester, with a team of just three people. Despite our limited knowledge in animation, sound design, and programming, each of us took on unfamiliar tasks and learned what was necessary to complete the project. This not only improved our individual skills but also strengthened our teamwork.

• Using a Premade Track

  We used a pre-designed dark ride track, which had a direct impact on the emotional experience of the guests. Therefore, we had to continuously adjust our experience flow to match the track's layout. Playtesting was crucial here; we iteratively tested and tweaked the content and speed of each track segment to ensure that the guest experience aligned with our design intentions.

• Hardware Choices

  During the initial phase, we experimented with various hardware, such as Joy-Cons for guest interaction and pedals for control. Although we initially planned to give players some degree of control, we realized during later iterations that balancing player control with a coherent experience flow was challenging. To manage the project scope and maintain a seamless experience, we decided to remove some hardware and only keep those that truly enhanced the experience.

Achievements

As the first group who developed dark ride using the ETC CAVE setting, we successfully finished the 4-minutes dark ride on time. We gained over 130 guests during the 2023 ETC festival and received very positive feedbacks from the guests.