Week 13: Adding Touch Interactions & Making Team Trailer

We still had one important feature to add to our experience – touch interactions with Ako! Often during playtesting and demos, we noticed that players want to touch and watch Ako respond. This required the use of Leap Motion Controller to track hands.

Which Interactions to Implement?

We initially came up with a list of interactions that a player could do:

• Poke
• Pick Up
• Tickle
• Tap

But if you look closely, Ako is very small – the size of player’s fist. The Leap Motion Controller cannot possibly detect the differences with such small colliders to interact with. It would also be boring to have only one reaction for a touch. Therefore, it made sense to combine all touch interaction and localize them to different parts of Ako’s body and play different reactions each time the part is interacted with.

Further, picking up Ako would mean the players would be dropping him anywhere on the table. This would mean we can’t rely on our ArUco to always keep track of Ako’s position. Further, Ako might be in a place which could obstruct the placement of Set Cards or even be out of the table! So, we do not allow the players to pick him but we do give them a reaction if they try to.

More Quick and Cheery Feedback

Players often get happy if they are rewarded with a better feedback. So, during cases a Set is detected, we also know the possible solutions the Set of cards could have. This means we already know if the flipped cards are a Set. We can immediately give feedback to the player if they are correct. If they are not, we ask them to confirm if they want to continue with their choice thus giving them a second chance.

We also added a much more quirky feedback when the players find the correct set.

Video Trailer Draft

We started shooting our video interviews for our trailer and prepared a draft version. We hope to share it with you soon! Until then, here is the Work-In-Progress draft: