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The Witch Next Door

Team	Georgia Tech Theme Park Engineering Design
Context	Freshman Welcome Challenge (concept design)
Role	Team lead, four-person team
Dates	August – September 2026

A concept design for a family thrill coaster in a Halloween-themed land, designed and pitched in about five weeks for the Freshman Welcome Challenge. Nothing was built; the challenge was to develop and pitch the idea. I led a four-person team through the whole proposal: ride layout, SolidWorks design of the station and vehicle, the interactive target system, throughput and safety numbers, and the business case.

1,440

Guests per hour, design throughput

90 s

Ride duration

2.5 g

Maximum sustained load on a rider

39 in

Minimum rider height

The ride

Riders board a pumpkin candy-basket car in Boo Junction, a 1950s American small town, and ride up the lift hill toward the grand estate on the edge of town for what looks like the last and best stop of the night's trick-or-treating. The witch answers the door with a trick: a 15-foot drop track drops the train into her manor, and the ride becomes a running battle through the cursed house and out into the courtyard before the town celebrates.

The story is the reason the ride system looks the way it does. The trapdoor has to land on the beat where the witch answers, so the drop track sits immediately after the lift rather than deeper in the layout. The courtyard fight needs riders facing the targets with time to aim, which is what the LSM launch into the courtyard section buys.

Hand-drawn concept sketch of the lift hill rising toward the witch's manor on the hill, with a graveyard and fence in the foreground — Fig. 1 Concept for the approach: the lift hill climbs from the town fence line straight at the manor's front door.

Hand-drawn track layout schematic labelling the lift hill, haunted house facility, pre-show and drop track, launch, shooting section, brake section, unloading station and train storage — Fig. 2 Track layout. Lift hill bottom right into the main haunted house facility, which holds the pre-show, drop track and launch; the shooting section runs across the top, then a brake section back down to unloading, with train storage off the bottom left.

Ride system

Four systems in sequence: separate load and unload stations, a chain lift, the drop track, and an LSM launch. Splitting load from unload is what makes the throughput target reachable: a train can be unloading while the next one is already filling, so the station is not the bottleneck the dispatch interval has to absorb.

SolidWorks render of the coaster station, a covered timber pavilion with airgates along the platform — Fig. 3 Station structure in SolidWorks, themed as a covered timber pavilion to fit the 1950s small-town land.

Second SolidWorks render of the coaster station seen from the approach side — Fig. 4 Station from the approach side, showing the airgates along the platform edge.

Three trains of six cars carry 12 passengers each. At roughly 120 cycles an hour that is about 1,440 guests per hour, with a ride duration of about 90 seconds and a maximum of 2.5 g, inside what a family thrill ride can hold while keeping the 39-inch height requirement.

Ride vehicle

The car is a pumpkin candy basket: two passengers, each with a water blaster aimed by a digital laser pointer the ride tracks for scoring. Two sealed storage tanks ride with each car, one of candy and one of raisins, replenished at an automatic refuel station so the dispatch interval is never waiting on a person restocking a train.

SolidWorks render of the ride vehicle showing blaster mounts and rear storage tanks — Fig. 6 Blaster mounts and the candy and raisin storage tanks behind the seats.

SolidWorks render of the train chassis underside showing bogies with road, upstop and guide wheels on the rails — Fig. 7 Train chassis and bogies on the track profile: road, upstop and guide wheels on each truck.

Scoring and the exit

Riders shoot at the witches throughout the manor, with the main battle staged in the courtyard. Scoring is per car, and the payoff is physical rather than a number on a screen: every rider gets Halloween candy at the end, and the lowest-scoring car in each train gets raisins instead. It is a small joke that does real work: it gives a family a reason to compete with each other for 90 seconds, and it gives the ride a reason to put a candy dispenser in the unload station.

The exit routes through the restaurant and gift shop and back into Boo Junction's town square, so the ride ends inside the land's celebration rather than at a turnstile.

Hand-drawn concept sketch of the drop track pre-show room with the train held in the witch's manor hall — Fig. 8 Pre-show concept for the drop track room: the train holds in the manor hall before the floor gives way.

What I would change

The scoring system is the weakest part of the proposal. A digital laser pointer read by trackside sensors is fine on paper, but we never worked out what happens when two riders in the same car hit the same target in the same frame, and the answer to that determines whether the scoring feels fair enough to compete over. For a ride whose entire payoff is the comparison between cars, leaving the tie-break undefined was the real gap.

I would also plan the drop track's capacity against the lift earlier. We sized the station for 1,440 guests an hour and then checked the rest of the circuit against it, which is backwards: the drop track is the slowest element to reset, so it, not the station, sets the real dispatch interval.

Credits

Designed with Derek Paterson, Zach Weaver and Willis McCranie. I led the team and wrote the ride's storyline; the SolidWorks design, operations numbers and business case were split across the four of us.