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Science Of Survival Driving game

The Science of Survival Driving game is a exhibit created as part of the touring exhibition exploring how we will survive on a changing planet. It was created with Spiral Productions for The Science Of…. and opened at the Science Museum in April 2008.

Set in the year 2050, the game takes place in a large, immersive, futuristic city, filled with skyscrapers, parkland, markets and numerous residential dwellings that might be used in the future. The game encouragess you to explore a variety of different modes of transport, from an electric scooter to a Hydrogen-cell powered mini-bus. Players are set the challenge of transporting a number of the inhabitants of the future-city to the big party in the centre with the goal of creating the best party the city has ever seen. Along the way, players will discover information about fuels that might be commonplace at that time, such as biofuel and hydrogen-fuel.

Four stations are networked together to allow all players to share the same environment, and the exhibit is connected with the overall exhibition to allow the result of their progress to be recorded at the conclusion terminals and to affect the portion of the city they end up contributing to.

The exhibition is currently on at the Science Museum in London, and will continue to tour for the next 5 years, to Paris, Tokyo, Washington and a variety of other destinations. For more information and to book tickets, visit the Science of Survival online.

The game was developed in C# using Mogre, Ogre, OIS, Newton Game Dynamics, OpenAL, OpenSteer (and my OpenSteerDotNet port), Theora. Art assets were created in Maya and 3DS Max, with a custom Python scene exporter for Maya.

Thanks to Chris for the cabinet photos. More of his pictures of the exhibition can be found here.