Hocus Hollow
Introduction
Over the Fall semester of 2020, I participated in the TEA@UCF fall design competition - a competition during which several small teams were given a prompt, to which they were to design a theme park land fitting that prompt, incorporating a coaster, a dark ride, a few flat rides, and the necessary knickknacks that befit a land. The prompt for the competition was "Other Worlds," a very wide-open prompt that led to my group - the winning group - creating a mystical land depicting a conflict between a bumbling wizard's attempt at scholarship and a conniving business-lady's money-making scheme: Hocus Hollow
Our team was composed of several members, all distributed to teams according to skillsets and desires. We quickly fell into roles, brainstormed our initial pitches, and came up with this magical valley named Hocus Hollow.
The lead creative director for the project and land was a skilled storyteller by the name of Jacob Young, who came up with the initial concept for the land, the key art for characters, primary story beats, and so much more beautiful content that fills the land. If it's whimsical, it's Jacob's work.
I took up the role of the technical director of the dark ride, working closely with Jacob to blend the magic and technology of the land, including a brand new ride system designed to convey a unique "magical" experience to further convey the theme. I also contributed some to the overall implementation of elements throughout the land, but my primary focus was on the dark ride itself.
Our team was also composed of Valerie Langdorf, who took up the design of the coaster in NoLimits 2, Carter Strong, who composed some music and created some plushie merch, and Akil Smith, who worked on the overall layout of the land.
Our team won the competition.
The Story of the Land
Masterminded by Jacob, the land is to be a hidden valley where there exists great latent magic energy in the space. A great wizard named Molbus “Molbo” Alloicios Hexenhiemer (coming in at about 3' tall) bought up the real estate, and decided to build himself a magical archives on the spot. Molbo, the scatterbrained man that he is, doesn't quite know how to manage construction vendors, and as such completely fumbled the project. The archives are composed of mismatched, incomplete, and impossible architecture, and the construction crews give up out of frustration. Low on funds, Molbo is approached by a cunning business-witch named Miss Fantazma Fortune, who strikes up a business deal with Molbo. She'd build a fantastical amusement park in the front half of the property, while assisting Molbo's construction fees. The pair shake on the deal, and Miss Fortune's plan to swindle Molbo out of the entire valley begins to fall into motion...
(Art by Jacob Young)
The Layout of the Land
The land is centered around Miss Fortune's Favor, the tacky amusement park plastered with her face and colors. Composed of a few flat rides, the centerpiece of the land is Mount Stratos-fear, a themed coaster where the guests are constantly just out of reach of Death himself. Attached to Mount Stratos-fear is the volcano-themed Eedalatta Lounge, and just to the right of that is a giant dragon skeleton into which a shopping district and counter-service restaurant is built. On the west side lies the "Harpsichist Theater," a multi-purpose theater building that rotates between four different whimsical shows, all dreamt up by Jacob.
(Art by Jacob Young)
You can view the entire presentation of the land here to get more information about any given part of it. It was a massive undertaking by the whole team, but from this point on I'll only be going into detail on the Arcanopolis Archives, the E-ticket dark ride of the land.
Arcanopolis Archives / Archival Survival
The primary focus of my work during this competition, Arcanopolis Archives is the E-ticket dark ride of the land. Designed to be a family-friendly attraction with some light thrill elements, the attraction is composed of a series of whimsical rooms and scenes, each different from the last, all which tie in to the overall story written by Jacob.
(Art by Jacob Young)
The Story
Molbo needs some research assistants. His archives are absolutely massive, and he's always in need of hands to help tame the mess that comes with managing that much space. So, he invites you into the archives to get to work. You're welcomed by his apprentice, Kennedy.
During your orientation, Kennedy accidentally releases a cast of creepy cursed spirits, and must explore the expansive archives alongside you, the hapless guests, who have been sucked into the adventure.
The Ride System
The ride story and experience is designed around moving from room to room, exploring densely-packed whimsical scenes with your eyes as you glide along. Pairing this with the slight thrill elements that boat systems allow, and you've got a satisfying start.
However.
I wanted something a little more.
Boats are fine, but not "magical." While we could handwave a canal through the archives as just Molbo's Madness, I wanted something a little more special - and something that would push my skillset.
Working with Jacob, we settled upon the idea that the boat could fly.
My thought was that we could use some mechanical technique to make the boat appear to "float away" from the canal during certain scenes, as if lifted by magic. This could also be used throughout the ride to imbue the vehicle with emotion or action, say, bouncing and swaying during an upbeat musical number, or rough and soaring during intense action scenes.
To this end, I came up with the idea for a "dry canal" boat ride, or, a cable-suspended vehicle.
(I'm not a mechanical engineer, so god help me when it comes to feasibility and safety specifics)
(Modeled, rigged, animated, and rendered by me)
The general concept is that the ride vehicle is suspended via cables at four points along each side, which then connect to a pair of shuttles that run along hidden rails that run alongside the ride track. These cables can be drawn in/out to provide the unique ride motion that would provide.
The canal that the RV would traditionally sit in would function as a cover to hide the rails, and could be filled with water - or not. The RV is only to be transported by the cable shuttles - which eliminates the controls challenges that come with many water-based ride systems.
In the penultimate scene, I intended to use this to its full advantage. The ride vehicle would appear to dip into a deep, dark pit as everything goes wrong. Their fall, however, is soon arrested by Kennedy's magic, which slows their fall in mid-air, carefully laying them to rest in the basement of the archives.
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(Art by Jacob Young, depicting the pit in the penultimate scene)
I intended, when I started the project, to rig, animate, and render a full-scale 3D pre-visualization of the entire attraction. Unfortunately, due to the time constraints that come with an engineering degree, I was only limited to completing the track layout and show scenes. But I'm satisfied with how they turned out, too.
Ride Layout
Focused on the ride system itself, I initially asked Jacob to plan out a rough layout of the attraction. Unfortunately, due to his lack of experience with ride buildings and paths, it ended up being a little rough. So, I took it over completely and began sketching out ideas for how the building and track would be organized.
Jacob had written out and sketched several vignettes of scenes that guests would experience over the course of the attraction, alongside the story itself. This was a massive help in the planning phase of the layout, as the layout process ended up being pretty straightforward, after starting.
In addition, we had two other major elements of the show building we wanted to include:
- A second story (for the drop), with a vertical lift
- A seating area for a table-service restaurant embedded into the ride.
We wanted #1 due to the fun, "magic" nature of being lifted vertically - in addition, we wanted a scene where we were backed into a corner and had what felt like no way out, only to be suddenly whisked skyward out of harms way.
The seating area was the more challenging of the two to include. Seating areas in existing attractions (Like Blue Bayou in Disneyland Resort's Pirates of the Caribbean) tend to be close to the load section of the ride, providing little attraction experience. I understand this for ride reasons - having guests immersed in a story and then suddenly thrust into a restaurant can be unsettling. But that was entirely why we wanted it - another unique, surprising element tying the insane nature of the archives into the guest experience.
The final, biggest challenge for the attraction's layout was the load area. When planning out the story for the attraction, Jacob came to me with the idea of having the story include dispatch. After you're snug in your seat, the story starts immediately once the operations staff backs away from your vehicles. Our story's antagonists, the purple-cloud "Shades" take over the ride, and send you careening down a dangerous path. This was quite a bit of show to include in what tends to be a throughput-limiting component of an attraction.
So, we decided that doubling up the load area into two, mirrored load stations that could alternate show/load process. Guests would be sent to a station, they'd be loading, and the other room would be dispatching vehicles. This combined with the high number of seats on each vehicle, and dispatching vehicles in pairs of two allowed us to have a relatively high theoretical riders per hours of about 2k.
Below are pictures of the first and second floor of the attraction
Each room of the attraction is designed around a specific "shade" antagonist, each of which have run amok in the archives. For example, the kitchen features the chef attempting to cook Kennedy alive, the seating room of the library features a cave-couple atop a skeleton t-rex, and the library features a writer whose literary machinations literally leap off of the page in pursuit of you.
Most scenes are detailed in the original presentation below (starting on slide 23), alongside the inspirational sketches by Jacob which show the key show gag in each scene.
In addition, here's a screenshot of the layout with a greater emphasis on the facilities surrounding the building
All of the above were created and laid out by me in Adobe Illustrator, all as vector assets. This allowed me to easily tweak any element of the attraction as necessary. It also allowed me to zoom in infinitely to take close-up screenshots of specific scenes, while also allowing me to take manageable screenshots of the entire attraction.
Special elements I'd like to note are the vehicle lift shafts, pre-show rooms and the maintenance bay.
A pair of vehicle lift shafts are used in order to ensure the necessary throughput that comes from running vehicles with about 30-45 second spacing. In addition, the presence of a pair of lift shafts allows for limited operation in cases of technical disruption - if a lift won't work, the other lift can still be used, just with the attraction at half capacity.
The two pre-show rooms are stacked on top of the area between unload and load - that space is only for empty ride vehicles to traverse, and have lower ceilings because of it. So, the two pre-show rooms sit upon that, and then empty into their respective loading rooms.
The maintenance bay is accessed from either of the vehicle lift shafts (not elevators) to the north-west of the restaurant seating. As the entrance is behind guests, it isn't visually intrusive, and allows for subtle introduction of new vehicles into the cycle.
In addition, as mentioned before about the vehicle lift shaft partial failure state, we'd need to operate the attraction at half capacity. Therefore, the maintenance bay has to hold at least half of the fleet of vehicles, and is sized appropriately.
The judges really enjoyed our presentation, alongside the fun and whimsical world we had created as a team. The biggest critiques we had received were the lack of specificity in the Archive's architecture style (none of us are familiar with architecture, so we were completely out of our depth in that department), and a particular judge mentioned the unfeasibility of the ride system, which I totally acknowledged.
All in all, it was a really enjoyable time, and I'm glad to have done it.
I'm not certain that I'll join another team this fall (2021), due to the commitment I have with Senior Design. But I'm glad I did it.