After a pretty successful quarters presentation week, we had to regroup and decide on what we were going to do next. We had already settled on the general style of gameplay that we wanted for the final product – An open-ended mini-world-in-your-room game that would encourage players to explore their virtual space. What we focused on this week was the interaction – How would players interact with this world? With what exactly would they interact? So we turned to our favorite validation technique – Prototyping!
We built three different prototypes to test three interactions that players can perform – One that puts players’ hands into the game, one that lets players walk through portals to get transported into a new world, and one that had a pet animal follow the player and jump onto blocks that he/she creates.
Portals Prototype
In the portal game, the focus was to understand what players felt about being teleported to another world. Since players are mainly going to play this experience in their bedroom or some other such constricted spaces, giving them a sense of exploration was going to be a bit challenging. By transporting players through different worlds, we wanted to ensure that the experience remained fresh each time, and that they always had more to explore, though the physical space was still the same.
Hand Prototype
One of the first things that many people who tried the game out during quarters did was stick their hand out and look for their hands in the virtual world. So they were a little disappointed when, instead of seeing their hands, they just created a bunch of blocks right in front of them like an obstacle. To fix this, we built a prototype that tracks their hand and replaces it with a bright red block in the game. However, there are fundamental limitations to how well this can be done, because of the framerate and field of view of the Tango’s sensor hardware (which becomes especially apparent for nearby object). We will have to decide how well this works based on playtesting and then make a decision on whether we want such a hand-tracking feature in our final game.
Pet Prototype
We are nearly at the halfway mark in the semester and, though our tech prototypes have been going well for the most part, we haven’t thought too much about the game aspects of the experience and the storyline. So our third prototype focussed a little more on the overarching theme of the story we were going for. Players would find an animal in the virtual world which would then start following them. They can then build blocks near their “pet” to get it to start jumping onto them! This is a fun interaction and it’s fun to see an animal interact with the world, especially with a little input from you. For example, you can get it to climb onto a desk by drawing out blocks from the floor to the desk with your hand or some prop. One possible story-arc we are exploring with this mechanic is that you find this pet in an alien world and you need to guide it to a portal in each world, which will take it to a new world and eventually to its home planet.
We have an in-house playtest session scheduled next Monday. We want to give these prototypes out to naive players and see how well they understand and respond to these features. We are confident that the playtest will answer a lot of questions we currently have and will give us clearer direction moving forward.