Unicycle adventure is a single player game in which players need to shake their phones or use bike pedals to move forward and stay at certain point within required time limit.
In this prototype, the pedal will go forward as player continues pedalling, and will stop when player stops pedalling. There will be floating barrieers which player need to stop and wait for the right time to keep moving forward. A success in the current level require players to reach certain position in the routine.
Intuitive interaction for pedalling
We decide to start with the concept of unicycle mainly because the pose of pedalling share some similarity with the motion of riding a a unicycle. We want to see if building such a game could build the connection of these two, thus people can have fun while also doing some meaningful exercise
Flow chart
For this game we design a total of four levels with different mechanism, in this prototype we have implemented the traversing through floating islands.
Tech
Since it took us 2 weeks to get the bike pedals delivered, we started developing this prototype with mobile phone input first. We utilized Air Console to connect with mobile phones by reading the acceleration data.
After we received the pedals with cadence sensor, we replaced the mimic input with actual pedalling. However as shown in the video above, the latency caused by the cadence sensor was noticeable, thus accquiring us to find another hardware solution.
Lessons learned
Through developement and playtesting, we learned the following points:
- The intervals between pedaling and idle turn into interruption when the game relies entirely on this mechanism.
- Need more feedback to build the connection between pedaling and cycling. Currently the game doesn’t have enough visual or sound feedback indicating if players are having interaction or not.
- Makes more sense if players can also pedal backwards. Right now we only support pedalling forwards and it fails to meet the expectation of riding a unicycle.
We also wanted to explore the factor of engagment behind exergaming, but by building this prototype and the feedback we got from quarters, we realized that such question couldn’t be answered if we don’t have a clear picture of our target audience.