It's funny how many times I can remember to blog and yet fail to do so. Last week we met with several University professors who requested games for either educational or physical therapy applications. My group (Mike, Jason, Alice, and myself) chose to work on a game involving the Kinect to help stroke patients with physical therapy.
Our game is fairly simple, but should hopefully engage patients and make physical therapy a bit more enjoyable. We're calling it Kinect Gardening for now (which might actually already exist.... nope, apparently not). In it you have a small garden with several tiles of land that you can work with. The game plays out in stages with breaks between each stage since thats how the therapy sessions work. First the player would till the soil, then plant the seeds, then water the seeds, and finally harvest their end products. These can then be sold at a market earning the player money. With their new cash, the player can then buy new seeds from a wide selection and customize their garden.
Other ideas for the full game are to have moles pop up randomly around the garden at any time and if the player clicks on it (wack-a-mole) they'd get a cash bonus. Another interesting idea that came up is to have a helper that would assist patients take care of areas of the garden that they struggle to reach due to their injury. As the patient recovers, they would then become less and less dependent upon this helper which would hopefully make them feel good about the progress they've made.
Working with the Kinect should be interesting. As long as we can get it up and running we should be able to make this game without too much struggling.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Post-mortem
Our first game has reached it's conclusion. The presentations today were all great, and it was really awesome to see the final state of everyone's games. They all look really impressive. I'm really looking forward to seeing what we all come up with for our future games.
In our post-mortem afterwards one point came up over and over again. Communication. Everyone universally agreed that we could have done a much better job at communicating with each other, especially cross specialization (i.e. producer with engineers, engineers with artist, etc...). Of course, next time with SCRUM in effect and stand up meetings going on every time the group is together this should be resolved, but it's good to keep in mind.
Common key highlights of the game process included getting collision code in, getting actual artwork into the game, and of course, finalizing the game.
The postmortem process itself, I felt, was very useful. It was really nice to sit around with the group and talk about what we'd done, how it had worked out, and what we think we could have done better. And while we definitely feel that there are a few things we could have improved on, all in all we all really seemed to feel that things had gone incredibly well.
Personally, looking back, it's great to see how far we've come since that first week when we were all struggling with Moai and it felt like making a game with it was going to be impossible. I love the game we ended up creating.
In our post-mortem afterwards one point came up over and over again. Communication. Everyone universally agreed that we could have done a much better job at communicating with each other, especially cross specialization (i.e. producer with engineers, engineers with artist, etc...). Of course, next time with SCRUM in effect and stand up meetings going on every time the group is together this should be resolved, but it's good to keep in mind.
Common key highlights of the game process included getting collision code in, getting actual artwork into the game, and of course, finalizing the game.
The postmortem process itself, I felt, was very useful. It was really nice to sit around with the group and talk about what we'd done, how it had worked out, and what we think we could have done better. And while we definitely feel that there are a few things we could have improved on, all in all we all really seemed to feel that things had gone incredibly well.
Personally, looking back, it's great to see how far we've come since that first week when we were all struggling with Moai and it felt like making a game with it was going to be impossible. I love the game we ended up creating.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Week 3
So I meant to write up two blogs this week, one on Tuesday and another on Friday, but that obviously fell through.
Part 1:
So on Tuesday our group met in the lab since we didn't have class on Monday. Jake and I combined our code fairly easily and the end product was a functioning game that, awesomely, was really fun to play! In addition to this, we continued finishing the game on Wednesday. I added the energy bar to the top of the screen and tied functionality into it. With our resource system working, the game only got even more enjoyable. From here, the final element was our cow bouncing which Jake and I worked on together to get into the game. It functions a little oddly, but works fine so we called it good for the prototype. On top of all of this we finally started replacing our placeholder art with Alice's art. It did SO much for the game, it was really awesome to see the difference it made.
Part 2:
We met again yesterday on Friday to finish everything up for Monday's presentation. Jake and I polished our final issue, that of the game ending. Now when the game ends everything on screen freezes instead of continuing to move, which makes it look much nicer. We also tied in the final art pieces and completed the game. Unfortunately, due to other meetings we weren't able to finish the final step of tying the game into Sherly's code, which would have resulted in an entirely complete game. We did get footage of the gameplay though, and AJ is getting his presentation for Monday ready. Our goal for Wednesday is to have a completely playable game from the title screen for Beehive Cheese to demo (minus sound since that proved too challenging to add).
All in all I'm very happy with our progress. I never really felt stressed (once we figured out how to get started with MOAI) and we finished on time without the need to cram in a bunch of extra time at the end. On top of that our game is awesome and something I think I'd actually play on Kongregate (assuming it was actually finished and not just a prototype).
Part 1:
So on Tuesday our group met in the lab since we didn't have class on Monday. Jake and I combined our code fairly easily and the end product was a functioning game that, awesomely, was really fun to play! In addition to this, we continued finishing the game on Wednesday. I added the energy bar to the top of the screen and tied functionality into it. With our resource system working, the game only got even more enjoyable. From here, the final element was our cow bouncing which Jake and I worked on together to get into the game. It functions a little oddly, but works fine so we called it good for the prototype. On top of all of this we finally started replacing our placeholder art with Alice's art. It did SO much for the game, it was really awesome to see the difference it made.
Part 2:
We met again yesterday on Friday to finish everything up for Monday's presentation. Jake and I polished our final issue, that of the game ending. Now when the game ends everything on screen freezes instead of continuing to move, which makes it look much nicer. We also tied in the final art pieces and completed the game. Unfortunately, due to other meetings we weren't able to finish the final step of tying the game into Sherly's code, which would have resulted in an entirely complete game. We did get footage of the gameplay though, and AJ is getting his presentation for Monday ready. Our goal for Wednesday is to have a completely playable game from the title screen for Beehive Cheese to demo (minus sound since that proved too challenging to add).
All in all I'm very happy with our progress. I never really felt stressed (once we figured out how to get started with MOAI) and we finished on time without the need to cram in a bunch of extra time at the end. On top of that our game is awesome and something I think I'd actually play on Kongregate (assuming it was actually finished and not just a prototype).
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