So after the moderate success of Round 2, I was somewhat excited for the madness that was about to hit us in the third round. We had no idea what the theme or our platform was going to be and the apprehension was killing us.

Lightning strikes hard

For the third round of BVW, our assignment prompt was to build a fun experience for the guests in the timespan of one week. This was the Lightning round as we did not have much time for iteration. My team and I chose the Microsoft Kinect V2 as our hardware platform for the experience.

I was on a team with another programmer, two artists and a sound designer. My primary role on the project was that of a Programmer but I also contributed to the design of the project. I was responsible for programming the controls and the interactions for the player using the Kinect SDK. The various interactions that were put into the game were jumping, ducking, punching and moving sideways. I also assisted in the level design for the game, deciding which obstacle to place at what point and the distance between each obstacle. I continuously iterated on the controls to get them working just right without any errors for guests of various heights.

We started the design process by going over the different kind of games that had been made with the Kinect over the years. We wanted to gauge the Kinect's abilities and what it was capable of, but at the same time keep the scope of our project in check as we only had one week to build it. We landed on doing something similar to an endless runner type game for the Kinect where you control the actions of the running character in game by doing them in real life. Since, an endless runner is truly endless, for the scope of our class we decided to frame the game as a castle escape game where you are running through the long corridor to escape the castle. The story in the game was that you were a little kid out trick or treating with your friends and you got locked alone in a haunted castle. You must run through the haunted castle, avoid all the obstacles to escape the castle. You can punch Candy ghosts to gain a "Sugar Rush", that gives you a temporary speed boost.

Kinect-ing the dots

A major challenge while working on this project was creating a simple yet fun experience while making use of the capabilities of the Kinect sensor while keeping the scope in check. Something that the Kinect is good at is detecting player movement so we decided that we wanted the guests to move around a little but not so much that they get tired and not too little that they get bored waiting around for things to happen. This involved continuously testing the pace of the game and the responsiveness of the actions that the player was doing and then tuning it to the point where we felt the guest would be comfortable doing this.

Another challenge that we faced was the level and gameplay design and ensuring that the guests can digest all the information that is being thrown at them and also that the narrative of the little boy trying to escape a spooky castle makes sense. This entailed iterative testing of the layout of the level to ensure that the player had enough to do as they were going through the experience, but at the same time making sure that they were not overwhelmed by anything going on. The aesthetics were also an extremely important part of the design and we tried to theme everything as though it would be part of a castle, like the knight or part of Halloween, like the zombies. We also wanted to keep the lighting a little dark to set the mood of an abandoned castle, but at the same time keep enough light to let the player see what is happening.

Round Complete

Our goal with the project was to build a simple yet fun experience for the guest where in they can enjoy being in an endless runner but are not too tired by having to move too much. The game-play experience was intentionally kept linear, we taught the guest the various interactions and then slowly ramped up the difficulty on them. This wasn't necessarily a smooth round and there were some team frictions that needed resolving and I learned that I could be a better team player. Overall, there was a lot to digest and I am hoping to take the lessons learned from my follies in this round and apply them to the following round and projects.