After a first round of comps, Linzi noticed that each of them seemed to work for different seasons. Ira’s was spring, Linzi’s was winter, Andrea’s was autum and Andy’s was summer.

Inspired, we decided that our game would rotate between four seasons. In addition to working on a second round of comps, the team also did some preliminary drawings of characters inspired by the seasons and how they could transform between seasons.

Linzi

Andrea

Andy

Ira

Krista

After looking at our first round of comps Linzi pointed out that they all seemed to be seasonal, which isn’t a bad direction to head in as an overall metaphor for the game. Over the next week we entered the story-line discussion phase of the game development process, since this would dictate our visual direction and the overall gameplay.

The great thing about going with a seasonal theme is that it would allow us to keep the game pla cyclical, and part of our overall goal was to create a game which people can jump into and out of very quickly, without any time spent on having to explain the particulars or to catch newcomers up to a higher level of gameplay. This meant that the game needed to be extremely intuitive, but at the same time still fun. The other good thing about sticking with the seasons is that it allowed us to pull from everyone’s ideas from the first round of comps, as you can see below.

Beginner Level: Fall
.The Harvest
.Andrea’s ‘Peter Rabbit’
.Halloween
.back to school / paper airplanes
.little characters are in long sleeve shirts & pants

Middle Level: Winter
.Death
.Linzi’s winter landscape
.snowballs
.ice
.shovels, snowboards, skiing, mountains, ice pics

Hard Level: Spring
.Life
.Ira’s plants
.Jumanji
.treacherous jungles
.rain

Boss Level: Summer
.Excitment
.Andy’s warm, inviting colors
.grass, beaches
.swimming, sports, frisbee,
.camp: wood, tents, bon-fires
.lemonade / ice tea

[end_columns]

Here is what Linzi had to say about her idea:

The game play for the “winter” level as I’m comping it will be that two of the characters will encourage the players and a third character will be frozen in ice. Saving the third character will be your goal!

How do you save the third character – you melt the ice with FIREBALLSSSSSS. (fireball lazors) In addition to melting the ice to save the character your melting the environment to turn into spring – therefore progressing to the next season! Two birds with one… fireball? lol… sooo lame.

And Ira’s variation on that theme:

May be each block contains a part of the broken weather machine. It’s each player’s goal to put together one before the other does – instead of the meters for each player, each accumulates these pieces, and once he reaches a specific point he is able to shoot at the Final Machine Piece (goal), which there is only one of. This can go with the same fireball melting environment idea – just at the end you have a weather machine to help you get to the next level.

And finally, our settled thoughts on how the elements of the game will function with the seasonal theme we seem to have settled on:

Block & Meter Info

1 meter

.dropping the ball transfers power to other player
.breaking blocks gives you power
.power only increases ability / never deters you from being able to break stuff
.blocks will take more than one hit to break / power will allow you to break with one

.your paddle reflects your power
.paddles should be visually defined from each other
.the ball inherits qualities from your bar

meter – sun energy(?)

**we don’t want to have to explain anything

– – – – – – – – – – – -POSSIBLE GOALS

. Sense of completion per season

Cycle:
-when all 4 seasons are hit, something happens (community)
-show year

Overall Goal

– move through the seasons – each level has a different block layout (difficulty is subjective) – move through easily and can enter at any timeSeasonal Goals

– something from the next season in the goal of the season before itSummer to Fall Options:
Leaf
Pumpkin man
Turkey
Halloween
Pilgrims
Indians

Fall to Winter Options:
Snow
Ice
Sled
Snowman
Hot chocolate
Snow shapes up to snowman
Ice pic
Santa
Shovel
Reindeer
Elf
present

Winter to Spring Options:
Seedlings
Cloud
Bird
Sun
Flowers
Raindrop
Sprout
[reading]Rainbow
birdhouse
bird eggs
seed to flower

Spring to Summer Options:
Sunflower seed
Butterfly
Rubber ducky?
Sun
Pool toys
Suntan lotion
Shades
Flipflops
Beach
Starfish
Sandcastle
Frisbee
Underwear
Lemonade
Nudity

[Video Outside of People Playing]
[Monitoring Seasons & Year]

Takeaways have season, year, and graphic of season.
Stickers, buttons

For the first round of comps the design team took to flushing out the wireframes for the game each in their own style. Happily enough, even though the styles themselves are pretty different, they all have elements that can be combined into one massive Awesome Style to fit the game. The great thing about these is that each comp had something good to contribute to the overall process – not one needed to be discarded of. Check them out!

Andy:

We really like the painterly style in this one.

The use of the illusion of real space here is great – it makes you feel that much more involved in the game.

Linzi:

The possibilities of giving the game graphics a “stop-motion” animation look.

Ira:

Here we could make weird creatures to be incorporated in the game – in this one, you break the juicy blocks to feed the hungry plant meters.

Andrea:

Awesome use of weirdness and textures – very cut out and papery. We liked the surreal feel a lot too.

Yay comps! Next round to come this Sunday.

We all did look & feel boards to convey the visual style we forsee for our game. There seems to be a pretty solid consensus over the directions that the design could go:

1. Use abstract imagery, bright vibrant colors of the glow sticks, and make everything geometrical and/or lines.

2. An environmental game with the possibility of using characters and impacting the literal environment, taking Little Big Planet and Moonkiroe as inspiration:

2a. Spin off of the environmental concept and go with a cardboardy – cut-out playful feel:

The environmental style seems like it would be the easiest to have the player relate to, and to make them care about the game. The abstracted style could probably get old rather soon, since it’s all just bright lights and particles. There is more potential for a story with the environmental style as well. We are going to try experimenting with the cutout style for the first round of comps this week, so watch for that!

Most of our brainstorming to date has revolved around trying to figure out how to create an entertaining game for the user. At our last meeting with Adam we determined that our goal was to make an entertaining game that is FLAWLESS – hence last week’s mutilation of our idea, and the process of regathering and rebuilding that we’re involved in now.

All our research and conversations with Adam seem to have led us to one basic idea – the best way to create a new game is to use an old, familiar, and already knownt to be fun one as a base. Something as simple as hot potato or breakout can be used as a jumping off point, dressed, added to, changed, etc, to create something seemingly new and exciting. Adam describes the process in 3 levels:

1. Skin the game - dressing an old and familiar game in nice graphics so well that the user doesn’t necessarily see past the skin of the game to the very basic and familiar concept, i.e. hot potato, breakout, etc. In something like breakout, which usually involves a ball that breaks blocks, this could mean that instead of a ball it is a small creature being launched at a collection of stuff that it has to gather while it is up there, etc. Same basic principle – different skin.
2. Advanced Game Play – this one means skinning the game, then taking the basic gameplay and changing it a little to add a new element. Taking the example of hot potato, may be instead of just tossing the object around, every time you throw it you have to rotate it a certain way to make it fit through a certain shape in the middle of the screen on its way to the other person. Adding this elements fundamentally changes the game and adds challenge, but the basic idea is the same – catch and throw, and don’t hold on to stuff or it will burn or otherwise deface you.
3. Deeper Meaning – this is the third and final level of the game design process. Not every game needs to be tied to some universal problem or cause to be fun and entertaining, but there are some out there that actually work really well for raising awareness of global issues. Weaving in a deeper meaning like that into the game allows players to make better connections with the game play and to care about the outcome of the game

We went through and identified some elements pertaining to each level of depth:

Then we identified some elements particularly applicable to our game:

And created a flowchart of the game play we outline in our conversation:

None of us really know why we waited so long before running our multiple engine, 8 mini-game idea by Adam (our professor). Yes, Michelle (our other professor) had already cut us down from 10 – 12 mini-games to the 8 we came up with now. But really, we probably should have anticipated just what Adam was going to say.

The day was best summed up by Linzi on our team messageboard:

Good news: We submitted our project to ImagineRIT.
Bad news: We need to completely tear apart our idea.

Andy, Ira, and I met with Adam today and he made some really good points about our project. Basically, 8 games is way to many if we want them to be flawless and fun – so we’re back to 1 perfect game.

We should think about arcade games – games at their simple fundamentals that are time-tested fun. The idea he went off of was ‘Hot Potato’ as our 1 game that would work because it needs no explanation.

With ‘Hot Potato’ we went through a bunch of things that we could be passing that we wouldn’t want (water balloons, eggs, bombs) and words that correlated with them (splash, goo, explosions). Those led into user interactions, such as the water balloon pops if it hits the ground and the screen fills partially with water that slows down the movement of the people.

Then we got talking about combining ‘Hot Potato’ and ‘Tetris’ where 2 people are passing ‘puzzle pieces’ that morph mid-air trying to find the puzzle piece that will fit into their ‘lock’ – passing through level graphics.

He said our game could go two ways: an entertaining game; in which the game itself has to be flawless OR a message; where the message guides the game.

And so, back to the drawing board we went. Many doodles, weird diagrams, funny hats, and simple games later, here is where we ended up, summed up by Krista:

Our proposed game is a two-player camera installation piece primarily based on Breakout (sometimes called Blockbreaker). Users will each hold two glow sticks in front of them to act as their ‘paddle’. Point detection will be used to simulate digital paddle length and flexibility. By moving the glow sticks apart, the paddle will become taut and provide a hard surface for the ball to bounce off of. By moving the sticks together, the surface will sag, creating a space for the ball to fall into. When users quickly move the sticks apart again, the ball will whip back into gameplay (similar to a slingshot).

Users must work together to eliminate any obstacles around their goal. However, the player who actually gets the prize in the middle is deemed the winner, so the collaborative gameplay will quickly turn to competition in the game’s final moments.

Other notable features are that the ‘blocks’ will not stay static. They will actually spin around the prize as they are hit, adding more difficulty to the game. When the game is completed, a new theme will be loaded. This means that graphics (such as the ‘blocks’ and ‘ball’) are subject to change, adding more character and creativity to the game.

Research references/possible image sources: Breakout, Bubble Spinner, Rope example (holding a rope and moving the ends together), Zach’s point detection experiments

For homework, we all went back to our respective happy places to think of simple games that would grab the user and keep him or her interested for at least 4 minutes.

Immersion

Something our team has discussed with this project is setting up a video feed of the players’ interactions with our game, and displaying it on a TV outside the exhibit. This is the perfect example of why this is both worth it and necessary. Watch it to the end!

A visual direction for our project.

A technical direction for our project.

After the presentations, the most positive response seemed to be to the Human Machine idea. The snowball game could be interesting, but would be harder to instill deeper meaning into, and we don’t want to build just another snowball game. The dancing art idea slowly got accumulated into the Human Machine as well – all we would have to do is have the body movements generate some sort of trailing sparkles, or whatever fits the concept the best.

From there, we focused on team building. In order to have the Human Machine be more interesting than just another game, we decided it should really force the players to work together as a community to accomplish some task. We are looking pretty extensively into team building activities (huge lists found here, here, here, and here) for ideas on the kinds of games we might want to incorporate into our installation. We want to keep these games very simple, but spin them in such a way that their overall meaning to the game is much bigger than just fitting shapes into other shapes or whatever. Linzi found this cool Swedish Armed Forces recruiting website, which does a fantastic job of keeping the games simple but the users entertained. And it does a great job of tying the simplicity of the game to the overall concept.

I also found this paper that goes through the decision making process for creating team building games in Second Life using the model of teams that are spread out wide and not next to each other. It’s long but interesting, with good examples of abstracted tasks representing a larger whole. It goes through several games:

All our brainstorming finally led us to choose 3 ideas for possible projects, which we presented to our classmates and professors during one of the lab times. The response overall was very positive, and helped us further narrow down our direction.

Idea 1: Art Creation

Concept Statement

Dancing, music, and visual art are part of almost every culture on Earth, but not everyone can dance well, or create beautiful art. We propose the creation of a virtual public art board that will interpret movement and convert it into beautiful projected art, accompanied by an audio visualization. A webcam system will interpret the movements of the individual dancing and correlate them with events on the screen – particle systems and collisions, color changes, swirls, object creation, etc. Having this dramatically altered visualization of the dancer’s motion will allow the individual to overcome self-consciousness and to create art he or she would otherwise have been incapable of. Possibly, an avatar may be created and controlled through movements of the individual on camera to increase the fun and decrease self-consciousness.

Collaboration Possibilities

• Community collaboration through creating a mosaic of the individual participants’ experiences on the website – a living, changing art piece.
  • ability to select one cell of the mosaic and watch that particular user’s experience
  • possible filtering by geographic location
• Collaboration through having more than one person dancing at a time
  • layering of visuals on top of each over (person A over person B)
  • different colors are used to represent different people
  • visual representation based on different dancing styles (ie: tango vs. the robot), fluid vs. jagged
• Building on other people’s work: one user records their experience, someone else then uses it as background for theirs

Solution Objectives

• Community collaboration
• Sense of accomplishment
• Use of creativity
• FUN
• Customization
• Entertainment
• Memories / Take-Aways

Research (references, articles, examples)

• Robert Hodgin is my hero. (sound visualization with processing)
• Realtime gesture analysis
• Interactive fireworks display
• 3D Graffitti
• Particles in Flash controlled by Webcam Interaction
• http://www.boffswana.com/news/
• GREAT EXAMPLE
• Adobe Wall
• Mesmerize

Project Deliverables (possible implementation descriptions and format)

• Installation – a webcam setup interprets the movements of the individual dancing to the music, which feeds into software that creates visual events on a semi-circular screen with the sound visualization as a backdrop
  • Interaction with avatar based on movements
  • semi-circular screen allows for full immersion in the activity by including stimuli for peripheral vision
• Website – uses user’s webcam to interpret movements to music and translate them to visual events on the screen, with the sound visualization as a backdrop
  • Living mosaic out of many users’ experiences
  • Possible filtering by geographic location of users
  • Ability to collaborate with other users and/or build on their work to create new art
  • Ability to watch streaming video of many users’ experiences
  • Interaction with avatar based on movements
• Capture frames or video from the user’s experience and allow to be saved or printed as takeaways / memories
• Capture frames from our own experimentation with the application and print as publicity posters for installation
  

Required Designs

• User Interface
• Installation
• Web Site

Required Technologies

• Webcam, motion tracking
• Processing (?)
• Myron is an open source plugin for processing that allows color tracking and motion tracking functionality.

————————————————————————————————

Idea 2: The Human Machine

Concept Statement

Techniques for team-building, such as ‘The Human Machine’, have been used for ages as a way to build trust, sense of community, and to have fun.  We propose the creation of a large projected game in which participants have to work together using points on their bodies (or possibly silhouettes) to get a ball from one side of the screen to the other.  A webcam system will interpret the movements of the individuals and correlate them with the real time movement of the physics ball on screen – whether it be rolling, pushing, tapping, or dropping from one person to the other.  In the spirit of quick installation art, the ball will drop from the top of the left side of the screen 10 sec after the previous run was a success or failure.  We want our piece to foster problem solving, decision making, communication, goal setting, and team building throughout a community in a fun and interesting way.

If possible, we would like to combine this idea with Idea 1.  As people hold their position while the ball rolls, their body points map out gesture art that remains on the screen even as they move away.  Their captured movements could build a path on which the ball will roll from one side of the screen to the other and make beautiful art.

Solution Objectives

• Community collaboration
• Sense of accomplishment
• Use of creativity
• Fun
• Foster problem solving, decision making, communication, goal setting, and team building.

Research (references, articles, examples)

• Webcam motion detection tracking
• Minority report actionscript webcam interface
• Actionscript 30 webcam motion detection with interaction physics
• Webcam motion detection in AS3
• Bitmapdata extract colour palette
• Actionscript 3 webcam tracks multiple objects
• Simple marker tracking using webcam

Project Deliverables (possible implementation descriptions and format)

• Informational Website
• Pamphlets / Flyers
• Installation

Required Designs

• Installation Interface
• Installation Room/Area Played In
• Flyers, Pamphlets
• Informational Website Interface

Required Technologies

• Webcam; motion tracking
• Flash Physics
• Processing

————————————————————————————————

Idea 3: Snowball Fight

Concept Statement

In the near future, humanity is plunged into chaos as a nuclear winter engulfs the world. The few surviving humans set about working to restore civilization and quickly realize they could never risk the use of what were once conventional weapons. Instead, the children of disputing territories settle their elder’s arguments for them using the resource most widely available. Welcome to snow wars. As a member of your tribe you must work with your allies to try and defeat the other tribes. Using specially constructed gloves, you will have to lob snowballs, rebuild walls of your fort and setup defenses. Or go online and build a custom snowball to wreak havoc on the enemy. A voting system will help establish the perfect snowball.

Solution Objectives

• Community Collaboration
• Fast-paced game action
• Stylized, cheery graphics
• Installation and web environment interact with each other
• Fun to watch, better to play
• Continuous games, individual players enter/leave

Research (references, articles, examples)

• Super Dodge Ball wiki
• SDB Brawl video
• Castle Crashers webste
• CC video

Project Deliverables (possible implementation descriptions and format)

Installation – a webcam setup interprets the movements of the individuals packing snowballs, throwing them, repairing and/or installing walls, and installing and/or repairing defense systems.

Website – users design custom snowballs which are then imported into the installation environment where the players vote on their effectiveness. The website portal will allow viewing of the game in play as well.

Required Designs

• Installation
• User Interface
• Snowballs
• Background animation
• Avatars

Required Technologies

• Web Camera, motion tracking
• Webcams (possibly between 2 and 4)
• Projection wall (dome?)
• Super arm suit (People wear over their clothes that has the colored points interpreted by the web cam.  We’ll probably need between 2 or 4 and each one will have their own color… possibly glow sticks in a dark room.)