Imagineers who helped carve out the experience aboard the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser were on hand at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to host a panel, “Starting with the Ending: Narrative Design of Galactic Starcruiser.” IO9 was there and shared some of the information about the design of the experience that was given during the special panel at the conference.
If you’re reading this, by now, you have some semblance of what the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is. But in case you don’t, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is a revolutionary new 2-night experience where guests are the hero of their own Star Wars story. Marketed as the most immersive Star Wars story ever created, guests arrive at the Walt Disney World Resort terminal, board a launch pod and rendezvous with the magnificent Halcyon starcruiser. From there, they stay in a cabin or suite with an exquisite view of space and explore the ship and interact with an eclectic collection of characters, sit down to exotic galactic cuisine and perhaps even plot a secret mission together.
As the itinerary continues, the story expands further and deeper, allowing guests to choose their path, seek out the inner workings of the legendary starship, learn the traditional art of wielding a lightsaber and even jump on a transport to the planet Batuu—where your mission continues at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. You can learn more about the experience itself by reading our review here.
The special discussion of the experience at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was hosted by Anisha Deshmane, assistant producer at Walt Disney Imagineering, and Sara Thacher, senior R&D Imagineer at Walt Disney Imagineering. Together, they focused on the design of the interactive nature of the experience, comparing it to a single-player RPG but also included that it also has MMO (Massive Multi-Player Online) elements as well, considering each “cruise” has at least 50 people playing in the living-theater game. The biggest takeaway from the talk however, was how the experience was designed in reverse, starting with the finale of the experience that everyone gets to see, and working backwards from there down different paths and story beats.
Guests are set to use Datapads, essentially a mobile app that helps guide them through their experience and allows them to make the choices they make that take them through their own story. But how did it all come to be?
“One of the key moments of high drama and high impact we had to [build to] is a live-action stunt finale. And that takes some planning, that takes some preparation, and it takes a lot of building those effects and into the very fabric of the building,” Thacher said. “But also, we want to make sure that everybody gets to see that. So we had so we started work on this years in advance; we actually designed it at the same time as the building. We started at the ending and then worked back from there.”
Since the target audience for this experience also includes families and friend groups, you can’t expect everyone to make the exact same choices together, and that was planned and expected from the beginning, with more than just even the two paths (Resistance/First Order) to go down.
“We know that people are going to also make different choices, right? So let’s say one of your components of a party starts making significantly different choices. Maybe one of them wants to go in for the First Order and the rest of you are playing with the Resistance,” Desmane said. “That means that the folks who are still playing together sort of create a subset of their travel party and keep them together, but then allow that person who’s made different choices to go off on their own and figure out what’s happening on the other side.”
Deshmane said, “You’re able to look at different things that are happening throughout the ship. Throughout those different spaces, you may get caught up in the conflict between the Resistance and the First Order. You may choose your own path and become a scoundrel who’s just in it for the credits. Or you might even find yourself in the middle of a romantic comedy love triangle situation.”
All these options means a lot of testing, right? Of course, but the real showcase of all their design work came when real guests were aboard the “ship.” Thacher elaborated, “We play tested with it, but there’s a lot we just didn’t know [in advance], and the real players are definitely play testers. It’s been amazing over the last three weeks to actually watch this unfold and we actually see a lot of travel parties splitting up. And whether that’s a really conscious decision of ‘you go over here and I’ll go there so we can get a feel for what’s going on, and we’ll share information later,’ or genuinely being pulled [in a different direction and becoming] interested in different things. It’s really amazing watching different travel parties go through this.”
The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is now open at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, FL.