Red Bull: Settle the Score
Settle the Score was a project I worked on for the duration of October 2023. The premise was that an AI named Cubert wanted to see his two favourite streamers battle it out in a series of game challenges, which would be streamed live on Twitch. In between game sessions, players could visit a different stream that occurred “inside” Cubert, displaying game stats, trophies and player created content from that week’s challenge. This stream would update in real time whenever a challenge was completed or new content was uploaded to be displayed on the central jumbotron.
Players also had access to a Twitch extension in that stream that allowed them to redeem tokens to show support for their chosen streamer team. They could get those tokens by answering trivia or unlocking badges, turning passive viewers into active players.
My task was to program Cubert’s Hub (the area with all the cubes) to make sure it was stable and could run 24/7 during the entire event so we could manipulate the scene without having to end the stream for a project rebuild.
I used a central JSON file containing information about the jumbotron’s content, trophies and platform elevation, I then called that JSON every few seconds and updated the scene only if changes were made.
After finishing the scene, I was then tasked to design a major puzzle that would serve as the finale event.
I then made a meta puzzle combining 12 hidden “employee IDs” containing a variety of symbols representing numbers. Players then called a hotline where they would input the employee ID displayed on the card to get a single digit keycode. They would then use that keycode to fill in any squares on the grid that would correspond to that code. Once all employee cards were solved, they had to be put together in the correct order to reveal one last password, completing the event and providing closure to Cubert’s story.
The event ended in October of 2023 and unfortunately, the sites and stream have been shut down, but you can still read up on it here: Red Bull: Settle The Score. The event was nominated for a Shorty Award and won the Gold award at Idéa 2024!
The main hub where players would go to during off-hours. Here they could view the event's progress and check out last game's leaderboard. The middle section would show who won a game's challenge with a coloured trophy. This stream ran 24/7 during the entirety of the event and I had to make sure the scripting was solid and the back-end easy to understand for the puppet masters running the event.
A prototype of an employee card for the meta puzzle I designed. Originally each card would have a math equation to solve in order to get the key code needed to fill out the grid, but there were already a LOT of numbers involved in the puzzle so instead we gave the key code to whoever knew the employee ID and the phone number to recover it. The entries shown in green indicate the correct grid nodes to fill in.
The final version of an employee ID card. It took me a lot of sleuthing to find symbolic connections to numbers and I wanted to avoid duplicates as much as possible throughout all 12 cards. In total there are 300 unique symbols/terms found in these cards. You used the sigils on the sides to put all the cards together like a jigsaw, which would reveal a pass code once all grids were solved.
The reception for the event was very positive! People especially loved Cubert, the event's mascot (and organizer). Both streamers received an LED cube that they would show during their challenges. Cubert would then react and quip about the streamer's performance in each challenge. At the end, the winner received a trophy matching the colour of their team, which would show up on the Event Hub.
The Jumbotron in the middle of the scene was used to show leaderboards, player content (screenshots, fan art, etc) and was also coded to play videos. I used a simple Media Texture array to make sure all 4 sides displayed the same thing and cycled through all media found in the JSON file controlling the hub, checking the media's file extension to switch between a video texture and image texture.