The second week was a four day week (although it felt much longer) owing to Labor day being on Monday. We kicked the week off with our advisor meeting where we pitched our four ideas to our advisors and got feedback. We quickly eliminated the zombie game, as it became clear that it was an overscoped idea in a somewhat cliche’d genre. Our advisors had mixed feelings about the other three games. Carl really liked the dolphin ball game and felt the music game had potential. Tom found the board game concept interesting and felt the music game lacked enough details. We finally decided to cut out the board game idea and focus our design efforts on the music game and dolphin ball.
With the new insights we got at the advisor meeting and a lot more information on the capabilities of the Tango (which we gained by building multiple simple prototypes), our designers set out to work on more detailed game concepts. We realised that making the game fully multiplayer-ready will be difficult as we will somehow have to share the area model information between the multiple tangos. This is over and above the standard perils of making a polished multiplayer experience. We decided that we should start with a single player experience and allow for expansion to a multiplayer game if we are able to complete the former in time.
New Ideas:
- Out of all the ideas that were brought up, two of them stood out. The first one is a pinball game played in real-world space. Imagine 3-D pinball in your room! You have a paddle/bat that you can use to hit a virtual ball around in the world. Points pads are placed in different locations around the room and hitting them scores the player points. Some of the objects in the room that fit specific size and shape guidelines will be replaced in the virtual world by dynamic objects (like a fan or a bell) that will react when the ball hits it!
- The second game is a little more loosely defined. We liked the idea that one player, with the Tango and headset on, will have to somehow distinguish between real people and NPCs (Non Playing Characters) among a bunch of characters that he sees around him. The real players are friends who are controlling characters either using a mouse and keyboard, or through some other means. This will be like a dancing game, where the player in the headset sees a bunch of characters, all doing the same steps. Since some are being controlled by other people, they will eventually do a wrong move, which will allow the guesser to find out which one and catch them. It’s a little bit similar to the Nintendo game Luigi’s Ghost Mansion.
We feel that with these two ideas, we will be able to come up with full-fledged descriptions of game experiences next week which we can then pitch to the advisors and get feedback on.