Making a Scene

A lot of work goes into each scene that we include in the Travelogue 360 game. The first thing is to find it! We pick destinations based on feedback from customers about the places you would want to see in future Travelogue games.

With the chosen city in our sights, we start working with local people to help us find sites that are just right for the game. We look for places that are a quintessential part of a traveler’s experience in that location, and places that have the ideal scale and amount of detail to make that scene a fun one to find hidden objects in. A member of our team may fly to that city to visit each proposed location and decide on the final list of places. This can involve walking for hours, grabbing taxis, rushing around on trains and taking lots and lots of notes and snapshots.

But that’s not all! Before we can proceed, we also have to get permissions from the owners of the site to use their location in our game. Only after a great deal of preparation do we actually get down to the business of taking photographs.

Each scene is composed from 8 or more individual photographs, which are digitally ‘stitched together’ to form a sphere. When playing the game, the player experiences being inside that sphere, with a full 360-degree rotation – all the way around the walls, and with floor and ceiling as well. This is where the “360” part of the name “Travelogue 360” comes from.

After we have completed the production work on the scene itself, we start adding all the hidden items for our players to find. We can include almost anything – a cat, a bat, a bow tie, a roller-skate … and each item is matched to the shape and lighting of the scene behind it. This is quite a time-consuming process.

Once the scene is all done, we add it into the game build to really check it out and start playing it for real. Who says you can’t have fun at work?