The Services Journey

This experience is a two-player, competitive basketball game built for a live WNBA event. Players stand on a massive LED floor, shoot at physical hoops attached to a giant LED wall, and the game tracks their positioning and scoring in real time. The result is a hybrid physical/digital experience where players are physically shooting a basketball while the environment around them responds like an interactive arena.

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The wall and floor are separate Unreal builds that communicate through a WebSocket server, hosted on a remote device. That server acts as the central control point for the experience, telling both builds when matches should start, when gameplay states should change, and when shared presentation moments need to happen. This keeps the wall, floor, scoring, UI, and event timing synchronized.

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Each player represents either A’ja Wilson’s or Sabrina Ionescu’s team. A’ja and Sabrina serve as the star coaches, appearing through holographic clips that play during the experience. Between and during matches, branded overlays, hologram clips, crowd animations, scoreboard updates, and timed gameplay moments all work together to create an arena-style experience.

All of the gameplay logic happens through a game controller blueprint, whose structure is built on four phases that drive the experience: Idle, Intro, Gameplay, and Outro.

When the experience starts, the game controller initializes the HUD, sets up its starting parameters, and transitions into the idle phase. The game world remains visible in the background while an AT&T-branded screen overlays on top. After the overlay fades out, a drone flies into frame and plays a holographic B-roll clip of either A'ja or Sabrina, driven by a level sequence. These hologram sequences are meant to keep the experience visually active between matches.

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Because a new match can begin at any time, the B-roll is designed to be interruptible. If the server sends a start-match command while a hologram is playing, the Blueprint does not wait for the full B-roll sequence to finish. Instead, it checks the current drone state and begins transitioning the drone out of the scene.

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The actual handoff into gameplay is dependent on the drone exit animation. This prevents the experience from snapping abruptly from a hologram presentation into the match. The Blueprint treats the drone sequence like a gate: the phase can move forward only after the fly-out animation is complete.

The game builds anticipation with a short cinematic setup: the drone flies into position from either side of the screen, and a holographic clip plays of either A’ja or Sabrina giving coaching tips, giving players a quick moment of guidance before the game begins.

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Once the coaching clip finishes, the drone exits the scene. This exit is the key handoff point between presentation and gameplay. After the drone exits, a three second countdown to game start begins. As the countdown finishes, the crowd cheers, the gameplay HUD animates in, and the player sees the scoreboard and timer. At that point, the experience has fully shifted from cinematic intro mode into active gameplay.

Players have 45 seconds to make as many shots as they can. When a player makes a shot, the system updates the score for that player’s team, triggers visual FX behind the hoop, plays a crowd cheer animation, and runs a celebratory clip of their coach to make the moment feel rewarding. The player can stand in one of four scoring zones. The closer zones are worth fewer points, while the farther ones are worth more, ranging from two to four points.

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The gameplay phase also includes pacing logic for quieter moments. If players go a while without making a shot, a coaching clip from A’ja or Sabrina will play to keep the match from feeling static. Throughout gameplay, the controller updates the timer and related game systems every tick, while the HUD displays the scoreboard and countdown timer. When time expires, the game transitions out of active play and into the end-of-match sequence, where the final score and winner are presented.

Once the match timer runs out, the HUD exits first, clearing away the scoreboard and match timer to shift the focus on celebrating the winner. When the final scores enter, the winner’s score is given extra emphasis through a vibrant UI animation. This moment is supported by the crowd cheering and fireworks lighting up over the winner’s side. In the event of a tie, both sides receive fireworks. After the winner has been celebrated and the final score sequence finishes, the game transitions back into the idle phase