Space Ship Thruster Visualization Test Environment

Test environment to visualize a crew's score through one of eight thrusters/engines on a space ship. Recommend to play in full scene, and unfortunately the sound cuts out a few seconds into the WebGL build. Each space ship is one team, there can be 4-8 teams but always eight crews per team. I could randomize the number of crews per team, but this is a first pass. I started this build with the idea of visualizing crews' impact to team scores through space ship thruster visuals. I started with assets in the asset store, before thinking about custom assets.

There is a three second countdown to prime the warp space visualization. After that the ships will begin animating and the options UI is activated. I left space in the middle of the scene for the beatmap visualizer, so ships are always placed on the sides. Each ship has eight thrusters, one for each crew, and one main engine that shows the overall speed of the ship that all eight thrusters contribute too. That main engine can be turned off in the options UI if its too confusing for the audience to understand that they are directly contributing to their crew's thruster which gets combined with all crews' thruster for the final engine thrust.

I am simulating scored notes total for each crew every 500 ms. Right now, if the crew in general does poorly, it gives a -2% acceleration to the crew's thruster's emission and its contribution to the main engine. If the crew does average, it gives 0% acceleration and great performance is 2%. So I am randomly generating numbers from -2% to 2% acceleration for each crew every 500 ms. Smooth animation is turned on by default, but if you turn it off in the options UI then you will see the updated simulated scored notes changing the crews' thrusters, the ships' main engine, and the ships' position every 500 ms. The ships' position is impact just like the main engine, so whether you turn off or on the main engine, the ships will move relative to each other based on the ships scores which are based on the crews aggregate scores. Right now the ships move relative to their start position based on their current acceleration, ie team score, but not relative to each team's scores. But I think it reflects a good visual for how each team is doing, which is also reflected in the strength of the ship's main engine emission.

In the options UI, in addition to turning the main engines on and off, the smooth animation on and off, you can also adjust how many teams/ships there are from 4 to 8. Let me know if you want to adjust crews on each ship also, to see how different amounts of thrusters look like, but I would prefer to avoid that. Let me know what you think about this visualization in general as well. I could also add an option to turn off the ships moving back and forth, and I could add in the beatmap visualizer and music to see how that looks.

I made the assumption that it would be easy to train the audience to understand which ship is their team's, which thruster is their crew's, and how their crew and team are fairing in the race. I made the prototype and the UI as a first pass at these ideas, and tried to make the whole experience easy to facilitate discussions within the team.