Magellan Project

          I consider myself to be an avid gamer and one of my favorite game series is BioWare’s Mass Effect series. You get to be the commander of a spaceship and explore the galaxy. You get to explore your ship and interact with your crew. Such an experience really colored how I approached this project and my version of the Magellan. I wanted to give guests the feeling of discovery with a huge abundance of things to interact with aboard the attraction.

I remember that once, when my family went to Great Wolf Lodge in Grapevine, they had this attraction called MagiQuest where you could buy a wand and interact with various elements and acquire new powers to fights dragons and goblins. I thought that was one of the coolest things ever so I came up with the idea of the tricorder. A device that could be used to scan everything within the attraction and give you information about it was born from my enjoyment of Star Trek, I have played a few Star Trek games and always felt disappointed that the tricorders in those games were always limited in function. You could only use them at certain points and locations, you couldn’t scan and learn everything about it, like real Star Trek. So, I came up with this device that would give you information about everything you scanned in the attraction.

            I then decided that I wanted the tricorder to be an integral part of the attraction and not just a simple novelty. So, I realized I had to find ways for it to serve some form of purpose outside of just being an accessory. The first thing I thought of was how our previous project involved preparing a meal for an alien embassy so I came up with the kitchen chef asking for guests to assist in finding ingredients that were safe for alien consumption. Then I thought it would be neat if they could go to the bio-lab and be able to scan the plants and animals with the tricorder on whether or not these food items would be safe for alien consumption. On the lower ends, is usually where the more technical and less flamboyant parts of ship maintenance happen so I figured that would be the perfect place to set up where the engine room and the gun stuff would happen. I put in a turret game because come on: It’s an attraction centered around outer space, there’s gotta be a shooting turret section.  At the end, with the different new designations, I thought about what would be the best way to end it all off. I thought that it would have been a cool idea if the guests were supposed to be like as if they were touring a college and deciding to choose where they wanted to go or what job they wanted in this case. I decided that the three occupations should be either a soldier, a scientist or a technician as those seem to be the most common careers of people on giant spaceships.