Hi everyone. It’s week 12 of our project, so that means we’re busy developing our final experiences for the semester.
This week we continued to focus on games targeting our tabletop projection setup. Here’s a look at what we’ve been up to.
Tapatan
Our board game Tapatan‘s development was well underway last week, but we decided to add some additional polish to the experience. Additions include:
- Improved AI – Cozmo will first attempt to move to a winning space or block the player before deferring to random movement as we had previously.
- Small tweaks – We adjusted dialogue and animations to create a more rich and intuitive experience.
Dating Cozmo
Much of this week was spent on a story-based game, Dating Cozmo. This game is a comedic multimedia experience aimed at adults where Cozmo attempts to engage in human dating practices. The player engages in playful conversation with Cozmo, experiencing a number of different events based on their input.
In order to enable clear communication with Cozmo–despite his generally garbled voice–we display Cozmo’s dialogue on-screen using graphical speech bubbles. As our projection setup allows Cozmo to physically sit “inside” our UI, we find the player’s attention is not split between Cozmo and the virtual world as might be the case in more traditional setups.
Technically, this game is built using a combination of Unity and the Cozmo SDK. We use networking code to enable communication between Cozmo and our Unity-based UI.
Take a look:
Treasure Hunt
We also began development on our final game Treasure Hunt. This game is built in Unreal Engine 4 and maps Cozmo’s real-world position to an in-game collider. This allows Cozmo to hunt for treasure, digging holes on our tabletop setup. Stay tuned for next week’s newsletter where we’ll showcase the game in action.
November 18th Playtest
We also held an informal playtest at the ETC on Friday, which will help us iterate on our final experiences. Take a look at the types of questions we asked here.