Rhythm Game - [Progress]

James Coote 2014-11-10 19:39:37 UTC #1

Spent the day integrating Leap Motion into our existing game. The game doesn't have a name at the moment (in fact, we're having a competition to find it a new name: http://www.crystallinegreen.com/competition )

The game is all about colour matching. Whatever colour is at the top of the wheel (as indicated by the square) is the player's current colour. Players rotate the colour wheel using their hand to change the colour:

(I'm assuming it's ok to use the Leap Motion logo at the end of the video? If not, let me know and I'll take it out. The video is unlisted at the moment anyway)

Our game was designed from the ground up to work as a motion control game, since it's being developed primarily for the Wii U / to use Wiimotes (rotate the Wiimote to change colour). Leap Motion is great, because it gives us the option to do a PC version in the future (though not decided for certain yet that we will). Downside is that at least for the jam, the game isn't exactly "fundamentally different", but hopefully we can think of some cool stuff (maybe with finger movements) that the LeapMotion can add to the game.

We're thinking we'll make the rotation only 90 degrees rather than full 180 degrees, as currently, it can be a bit uncomfortable / a strain on the wrist rotating it a full 180 degrees.

The other problem is with player's occasionally moving their hand outside the range of the LeapMotion, thus losing control for a second. Since it's a music game, don't really want to pause the game when that happens as it'll really break the immersion. Also, one time, the up axis of palmNormal flipped when this happened (see video below). Hopefully will happen less once we change the rotation angles.

Most of the work done so far has been spent re-coding our input system to handle different forms of input. The actual code to use the leap motion worked great straight out of the box. From a technical perspective, we just grab palmNormal and do a bit of maths on it to get the rotation, then feed that into the game to rotate the colour wheel, change the colours etc.

katem 2014-11-11 00:31:49 UTC #2

Really awesome progress -- excited to play this one. Logo use is fine as long as it's made clear that the video was not produced by us in house, which your description makes relatively clear

Keep on keepin' on.

James Coote 2014-11-11 23:29:06 UTC #4

Going to rerecord the video into something nicer tomorrow, but meantime, here is two player mode:

Tried 4 players/hands as well with my flatmate, but seems to lose hands too frequently to make it really playable

James Coote 2014-11-12 14:54:15 UTC #5

New video! The sun came out this afternoon, so was able to get decent lighting in the office. Still needs work to adjust the hand angles, and just noticed on the two-player multiplayer, the split screen camera angles frame out a big chunk of the colour wheel.

After that, need to put a temporary interface on the game and fire off a PC build so can submit by the 15th. Spent a bit of time last night making the itch.io page

momothemonster 2014-11-27 05:56:04 UTC #6

Cute! I'm a big fan of rhythm games, this looks like a good start.

James Coote 2014-11-27 15:50:31 UTC #7

We demoed the game at Insomnia Gaming Festival last weekend and it was interesting putting it side by side with the Wii U version to see how the two compared. Generally, people found the Leap Motion version more natural feeling, but there were a lot of problems with people putting their hand too close or too far away, or their hand naturally drifting away from the sensor since they were concentrating on the screen and not where their hand was relative to the device.

The other thing was that it turned out I'd ended up designing the game for left-handed people! It worked exactly the same with both hands, but the more natural and easier gesture that I'd designed it for, worked when twisting the wrist clockwise with the left hand and anti-clockwise with the right. Right handed people often instinctively turned their hand anti-clockwise, resulting in them contorting their arms and wrists when all they needed to do was turn their hand in the opposite direction.

Interestingly, when we then got the same right handed people to play with their left hand, they naturally found the gesture I'd designed for and found the game much easier. When we next upload a build, will detect which hand the player is using and if right-handed, start rotating from a palm-sideways (chop) position, rather than hand flat/palm down

CadePeterson 2014-11-28 20:43:21 UTC #8

Wow, that's fascinating what you learned about the babe mechanic design accidentally being ideal for left handers, but fortunately early enough to update for the 3D Jam.

James Coote 2014-11-30 15:40:52 UTC #9

Fixed the stuff with left-handedness and also added thumbs as a trigger to fire power-ups in race mode! Though at the moment, it just detects thumb movement in the x-axis, so if your hand is vertically oriented, it won't quite work

Unfortunately going to have to drop out of the jam We're not ready to release the game to the general public yet, since this is a long term project for us and we want to bring it out only when it's completely ready. However, there's no way to submit to the jam on the itch.io site privately / without making the game publicly available for anyone to download.

Also, leapmotion want to feature all finalists / winners on their store, and it states in the rules they have the right to do so for any submitted game. Fair enough, but for us, that's not appropriate.

For those that want to try out the game, you can download it from here: http://crystalline-green-ltd.itch.io/unnamed-rhythm-game?secret=haWT8wijprnMxiWEMXVFZUzihs We'll leave the link up probably till the end of the year.