Here goes another semester of awesome project work! This week was mainly about everyone getting set up in the new city and workplace. The EA campus looks great and walking around amongst some of the brightest minds in the games industry is very exciting.
We are required to use the Google Tango placed inside a headset. The Tango has advanced sensors that can detect depth in the environment (how far objects are from you). This allows for a Virtual Reality experience where the system understands the space in front of the user.
Our team for this semester is going to be called Gotan – a play on Tango. The device was found to have a few issues during the brief time we got to play with it in BVW, but isn’t that how every cutting-edge product starts out? With the new and improved version of the device and an awesome team of programmers, we can’t wait to see where we can take it.
Hardware Challenges:
The core challenge for this project will be figuring out the hardware early. Being a new, almost experimental product, we need to figure out what parts of the Tango work as advertised and can be put into a game and what parts cannot.
We have the added challenge of making a Virtual Reality experience, which means it has to be very immersive and a tight experience overall.
Our third challenge is the requirement for the experience to be multiplayer. Apart from the technical challenge of getting each tango to recognize the others and talk to them, this also poses interesting design questions about what will be fun and encourage player-player interaction.
Ideas:
We realize that, being a Discovery Project, we need to work quick and settle on an idea early so we can develop, playtest and polish the final deliverable. We came up with 4 ideas which will be presented to the advisors for feedback
1) Zombie Kill – Take a classic shoot-em-up zombie game, and instead of a post-apocalyptic desolate world, imagine zombies coming out of your room! That is Zombie Kill in a nutshell. Players will use the Tango to scan the room.
2) Music Game – This game will take your room and morph it along with music – either what players make themselves, or from a public repository like YouTube. Guests will be able to experience their room in ways they never imagined before, through the lens of music.
3) Board Game – This is your standard board game… in your room! Place archers on top of a desk to give them a height advantage. Use the doorway as a narrow passageway into your base. The possibilities are endless.
4) Dolphin Ball – This is inspired by the concept of dolphins using their head to hit balloon balls. You are the dolphin. Use your head to hit a virtual ball back onto your opponents side. There are so many possibilities of fun engaging games within this simple framework.
