Without play testing, the structure of the interest curve is hard to determine. We have tho opening animation which explains the plot and gets the player familiar with the story. After the player volunteers to go into their own mind to explore their understanding of emotions, the first person shooter is encountered. This stage will increase interest even further, the challenge from the gameplay mixed with the intellectual focus to find the right target will retain the attention of player.
Our game has very fundamental and simple implementations of most of the basic components of a good game. Challenge vs. Success is inherent in a fps. The challenge is shooting the targets, the success is successfully shooting the targets. This is developed a bit further in ou game though, because the objective is not to just shoot every target, it is to shoot the appropriate apparition representing the emotion or feeling in question. We do more than just incorporate hand and eye coordinations required for a FPS, but we also challenge the player’s mind. Their tasked with successfully shooting the correct target, finding the correct target is a challenge to the head, then being able to shoot it is a challenge of the hands.
We also have a punishment system and scaffolding system. If the player chooses the wrong target and begins to shoot it, they will lose points and be warned that their choice was an incorrect one. So far we only have a punishment for the intellectual component of the game, as for the hands and skill required to shoot the appropriate targets, we have not implemented a scaffolding system to help them develop these skills.
Our game introduces only a simple implementation of chance, so far. After the player enters the mind of the main character to begin exploring feelings, they have to hunt down manifestations of those feelings. To make this hunt interesting these objects need to be difficult to catch, to do this they must follow arbitrary paths. Using the random library in python I assign a random theta value for a 2D rotation, then a random value to be travels in the new direction the object is facing. With only a random rotation and a random forward distance traversed the path of the objects appear to be quite random and yields an appealing and somewhat natural desire to hunt them down.
Future implementations of chance could be in the aiming system. Currently there is direct ray tracing being do from the cross hair, if the player clicks the left mouse button while the ray pings back a positive hit the appropriate actions are taken for scoring and game response. The direction of the ray could randomly modulate through a tiny circle around the ray origin. Being able to shoot efficiently with this implementation will require skill. They will need to become familiar with the “workings” of the targeting system, much like understanding the strengths and weaknesses of real guns and weapons.
The player currently has no ability to influence the chance or probability in the game. The movement of the NPC’s as well as the random inaccuracies of the targeting system are fundamental game mechanics. That player has no access to understanding anything about the NPC’s beyond what they can observe. This however is plenty to get a good estimation of how their movement works. It should be noted however that even though the random movement pyton script is simple and is a series of rotations and straight line traversals. In game with your movements and them moving around in front of you in 3D, this is not as obvious to see.
As requested by my advisor:
The probability of drawing a king of diamond AND an ace of spades from two full decks of cards (that are shuffled), is simple the product of their individual probabilities… 2/104 x 2/103 = 1/2678
Throw three dice (with faces 1-6). What is the probability that the sum will be 10? 12? 14?
This is the all possible combinations to make the sum divided by all possible combinations…
10: 1/8
12: 25/216
14: 5/72
So far you can move the hand in the 4 basic directions with the usual, w, s, a, d, keys. You can also use e, and r to move up and down in the z direction. I added a simple animation where the hand spins on it’s side! Playing it in the game engine doesn’t look exactly as planned, but got the job done perfectly!
Our game will have very few rules. It is being designed as some sort of extra pseudo natural experience. The player stands in front of the Kinect, and then their standing in a party on the screen. This is in accommodation for our audience, we “know” our audience and we’re designing the game mechanics and parameters to suit their gaming experience. Once in the party, moving their body around will be the interaction in the game, this will be VERY natural and objectively the game rules and be inherently learned after a few moments in front of the camera.
Currently, the players motivation or ‘reward system’ will come from within. We’re going for a players curiosity. We have not yet decided on an appropriate goal, but one that came to my mind is to build on the curiosity component. Not only will the player be using a natural interface, but there will be an NPC in the house, motioning for the player to follow them. The player will become ponderous… “Who this person?” “Why are they asking me to follow them?” “where are we going?” This will be the motivation to continue through the game, where along the way the story will unravel and the player will be exposed to various emotional states and experiences from the NPCs.
The operative actions for the player will be moving their hand. Until further testing and development can be done with the Kinect sensor planning for any further functionality will me unfeasible. The added sophistication to the interface will take a tremendous amount of time not within the scope of our project, but is definitely something that should be considered in the future. Through this single operative action there will be various resultant actions within the game, the player will be able to control the position of their avatar, and they will be able to make in game choices to decide the development of the game and where the story will go. We can also add simple functionality to interact with the 3D environment they are in to add a simple but interesting and intriguing degree of sophistication.
Though the development of virtual skills will be very limited, the real life skills learned in this game should be extensive. The entire purpose of this educational game is to expose autistic children to a wide variety of emotions and help them learn what these emotions are and how to interpret and react to these emotions. Using the sophisticated scaffolding system which is being developed with psychological research the skill set and knowledge left with the player should be useful in the real world, at home, and in public.
I am the team Programmer. Though my intentions have always been to focus on the design and production of the Kinect/Blender interface, I have been spending time working on modeling and planning out the story with my other teammates. Our team progress had been stagnant for the past few weeks after a dispute we had regarding the direction of the game, but with that behind us it seems like we will be moving forward with more fervor.
I have various components to my programming tasks. The most overwhelming and time consuming is implementing the tracking algorithm within the python code on every frame received from the Kinect. Plugging it into blender wasn’t very difficult, there is a python interface to the Kinect, just call a python script from within the game engine which accesses the information from the Kinect, and voilà. What to do with this information is more difficult. Applying the required computer vision algorithms to the arrays to find and track the hands is a task which I don’t yet completely comprehend. However, once an implementation has been produced, the next step will be coordinate system registration.
So the user will be standing in the ‘user coordinate system’ while the game is happening in the computer world, and in particular the ‘world coordinate system’ as Blender calls it, but here we’ll call it “game coordinate system”. I will need to find the appropriate transformation which maps the user coordinates into the world coordinates. After this has been done, the coordinates of the users hand will be Blender game coordinates, and all that is left is to have a blender object move to the new points every frame.
This will be the rough prototype for the Kinect interface into Blender. For our game however the hand is going to be used to interact with the environment. There will need to be more programming done to recognize where in the environment the hand model is at and have predefined animations, or responses to being in those locations.
Though sluggish, our team is still making progress towards producing our game. We have three current directions being taken to develop our game.
The Story – Both Sungwoong and Filiz are developing the story together, while implementing psychological components to enhance to educational benefits to the players.
The Graphics – We have all been working on small components to contribute to the collection of graphics we’re planning to use in the game. I have constructed the hand model that we will be using for the selections process, Sungwoong and Filiz have broken the construction of the environment into both the construction of the NPCs and the house model.
The Interface – I have been working to plug the Kinect sensor into the game engine to use what it sees as input into the game. Ultimately we will be tracking the players hand and using it to move objects on the screen. This is mostly going to be used for answering questions.
Our original idea of just having the child answer questions coming from some on screen avatar wasn’t comprehensive enough. Through the presentation of our game, and the feedback we received we have refactored the components of our game to provide more “game like” functionality. We made a decision and began working in that direction, but after reviewing where we started and where we ended up we learned a lot about how to improve our game.
Various components could go wrong in this game. The most likely candidate will be the natural user interface. Plugging the Kinect into the game engine proved to be easier than anticipated, however analyzing the data from the kinect, applying computer vision to it, and using the results as input is proving more daunting. There are many aspects that could go wrong, number one being processing time. Depending on the implementation I use to track the hand, if it is slower than the intrinsic frame rate in the game engine, then we will see the ever abhorrent, lag…
I am confident that most all users of this game will be impressed and pleased with the interface. Being able to use one’s body to maniplate the virtual world has always been something of science fiction, however with the advent of the Kinect it has become a very affordable reality. As a part of the feedback system to the player, we’re developing a sophisticated scaffolding system which should provide very ‘pleasurable’ feedback to the user in good light. However if the user is having difficulty making correct decisions, or is not following the rules of the game, the feed back will be more direct and stern. Our target audience is autistic children, so we plan to ensure that all feed back and game parameters are geared towards optimizing their in game experience.
To explore the actual design and structure of this game we are using Jesse Schell’s book The Art of Game Design. One of the “lenses” he uses to look at games is the lens of the elemental tetrad. There are 4 components to the tetrad:
Mechanics
Story
Aesthetics
Technology
How does our game fit into the 4 Tetrads?
Mechanics – These are the guidelines, rules, and procedures which give structure to our game. Our target audience is autistic children, in this light, our game mechanics must be direct and straight forward. The backbone for the game will be a “quiz”. We will try to hide the nature of the quiz in an interactive environment which immerses the player. At different positions in the environment, the player will interact with npcs which will question the player about the scene, environment, or the things in the environment. This way though the player will be answering questions, it will not seem like a direct quiz, but more of a puzzle. The puzzle and “quiz” is intended to provide the player with an educational experience, enhancing their understanding of emotions and how people work and interact in large social settings. This is a primary symptom of austism.
Story – The environment we have chosen is child’s birthday party. A birthday party provides ample opportunities to explore the feelings and emotions of others. There are children, who wear there emotions on theirs sleeves, and adults, which can provide a more sophisticated exploration of emotions. Perhaps the adults will provide a sort of “leveling” system for the game. The player will enter a house with various rooms. In each room there will be a different scene unfolding, for example a parents cutting a cake with a child eager and excited for a piece. Then perhaps another room where kids are playing games and one child is crying, while an adult scurries to the rescue wearing frustration on their face. As the player navigates the scene the story will unfold and they player will be exposed to a wider variety of emotions in different levels of complexity.
Aesthetics – Our game is going to be designed and presented using Blender, a 3D graphic design suite with a reasonably sophisticated and rapidly growing game engine. The house and the characters in the house will probably be found as free models available online. This way we can save time and focus on the psychology and interface for our game, which are the two areas of focus.
Technology – The technology we are using is going to make our game very unique and hopefully much more accessible to autistic children. To interact with most graphical games requires a medium, some sort of controller or gadget that must be manipulated to provide input to the game. This extra level of abstraction will make reaching the autistic children that much more difficult. By using a hands free, natural user interface, it will innately peak interest in the player, while also providing a more immersive experience. We have chosen our interface to be Xbox’s Kinect Sensor. Using their hand, the player will move a hand model in the game to interact with the environment. This will be directly used for, but not limited to, selecting certain answer choices while interacting with the npcs at the party.
To add a degree of “gameness” to my creation I added a timer. A timer for what? Well what ever you want I guess, I just made up some fun rules in my head… How about to remove all the blocks from the plane before the timer runs out?
Next was to test the hand model with some physics and see how things interacted. There are 200 blocks with dynamic physics sitting on a static plane. The hand is underneath the plane, and after passing up through the plane it tosses the blocks about. There are two light sources, ambient lighting, and a spot light.
