Two New Games for the Pursuit by Equinox

Game design for an award-winning, immersive studio cycling class

My Role: UX Design
Creative Direction

The Client: The Pursuit by Equinox
An interactive cycling class where riders play games based on exercise science. The goal of class is to make exercise fun, competitive and trackable through data.

Goals: Deliver two new games for the Pursuit cycling platform

Tasks: Ideation
Storyboarding
Motion prototyping
Code prototyping
Visual Design

Timeline: Approximately 9 months to first public release

What is the Pursuit?

'Crossroads' A New Climbing Game

☟ In Round 1, four teams ride to collect as many tokens as possible for 5 mins

☟ In Round 2, teams can collect tokens only if they are riding at the same pace or faster than Round 1

☟ Teams with the most tokens win (or tie)

'Inferno' A New Sprinting Game

☟ 6 teams ride as hard as they can for 30 secs to generate energy

☟ The teams with the highest energy win (or tie) the round

☟ The teams with the highest overall energy over the 5 rounds win (or tie) the game

SEE THE PROCESS

Key Challenges

Riders had been playing the exact same games for almost a year.

New games were needed to refresh the experience and prevent class attrition.

As an award-winning platform anything added to the platform was more closely observed by internal stakeholders.

Research

Gathering feedback from instructors

We conducted several roundtable ideation sessions with instructors and collected written feedback. Our goals was to answer the questions:

☞ What is working in the existing games?

☞ What would you love to see for a new game?

Research

Learning how to teach Pursuit classes

Taking the Pursuit Instructor Training with Jeffrey Scott, the cycling expert behind the concept.

Mapping the Existing Experiences

Breaking down and cataloging the existing games, end to end

Ideating and Storyboarding as a Team

Storyboard for 'Crossroads': 10-min 4x team climbing game

Storyboards for 'Inferno': 5-min 6x team sprinting game

Prototyping & Animated Wireframes

Static wireframes were not going to suffice in communicating game mechanics. Games were prototyped in low to mid-fidelity animations.

Climbing Game: 'Crossroads'

Sprinting Game: 'Inferno'

Prototypes in Code:
LiquidFun physics engine + ThreeJS

The concept of the sprinting game was based on lava liquid exploding into a geyser. I had to resort to code libraries to create prototypes to more clearly communicate the fluid effect. After much wrestling, I was able to create variations based on this LiquidFun codepen by CX20, and this ThreeJS lava shader by TheGameMaker.

Testing Prototypes in the Cycling Studio

One of the most critical aspect of the projects was grasping the nuances of designing a fast-moving experience for a very large screen. Some of the additional factors that had to be taken into account were viewing angles, preventing motion sickness and accounting for the instructor's positioning.

Two New Games for the Pursuit by Equinox

What is the Pursuit?

'Crossroads' A New Climbing Game

☟ In Round 1, four teams ride to collect as many tokens as possible for 5 mins

☟ In Round 2, teams can collect tokens only if they are riding at the same pace or faster than Round 1

☟ Teams with the most tokens win (or tie)

'Inferno' A New Sprinting Game

☟ 6 teams ride as hard as they can for 30 secs to generate energy

☟ The teams with the highest energy win (or tie) the round

☟ The teams with the highest overall energy over the 5 rounds win (or tie) the game

Key Challenges

Research

Gathering feedback from instructors