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.
No comments:
Post a Comment