By evonfisc

Week 5

Week 5 started out with faculty walk arounds on Monday, from which we gained some important insights into our project.

  • Hurdles are difficult to react to in the current perspective.
    • To solve this we are pivoting to 3D, using a 3rd person camera
  • It is difficult to tell which player the user is controlling.
    • We plan to make opponent’s characters 75% of the size of the player’s.
    • We are also considering the possibility of not putting the players all on the same screen.
  • Powers should be used strategically, but it is difficult to have accurate touch input while running in place.
    • We have come up with two possible solutions to this problem:
      • Make any touch to the entire screen activate a power.
      • Have a slower, autopilot run speed, so that players can top running in order to use the powers
    • We plan to test the full touch screen method at our playtest next week
  • Because of the competitive element, the game is tiring and it is unlikely that players will continue to come back to the game.
    • We are still struggling with this problem, we have had multiple suggestions but have not settled on a solution.
      • We can make the races shorter and use a tournament bracket to encourage replayability. (Heat Races)
      • We can make the races longer and encourage player pacing.
      • We can add in an autopilot run speed so players can rest at points during the race.
    • We are open to other suggestions.
  • The game has a lot of losing in it and only one winner, this can discourage students.
    • We plan to include feedback regarding improvement over time, as well as add in frequent badge unlocks.
    • We are considering making new powers unlockable through the single player mode.
    • We are also considering switching to an endurance model, where everyone ends up losing eventually.
    • We are considering adding daily challenges.
  • The player needs a reason as to why their character is racing, in general it all needs more context.
    • We have looked into multiple different theming options, and have run into the challenge of finding a theme that appeals to both genders.
    • We are currently looking at 2 head sized characters in a ninja themed environment.
      • We are doing this because upon reviewing research of gender associations in video games, the most overlap occurred in racing games with ether high tech environments or relatable characters.
      • We hope to make the characters relatable by making their heads large and their expressions evident.
    • The game needs more humor.
      • We want to include humor, we just haven’t decided how.

After quarters, we immediately began development on our 3D prototype, as the perspective was one of the most evident problems with our game. Since we decided to try for a ninja theme, we also began developing our 3D assets within that theme. On Wednesday, we had our weekly client meeting and discussed with our clients some of the feedback that we had received from quarters. The clients were happy to allow us to pursue our own design decisions, but offered a few suggestions in regards to optimizing the difficulty of the game. They pointed us in the direction of heat races, if we wanted to shorten the length of each individual race, but still retain the overall play time. If we were interested in a longer race, they pointed us in the direction of the steeplechase event. We considered the options, and we decided that we wanted to try for an endurance event. We looked particularly at the design behind Temple Run and considered ways to make Temple Run a head to head multiplayer experience. On Friday, we met with our faculty mentors to review some of our decisions following quarters and the general status of the project. After our meeting with our faculty mentors, we met with Ralph for our faculty sit-down as part of quarters. Ralph advised us on different kinds of physical activity that could be tracked through the accelerometer.