A few weeks back, my cohort’s thesis games were chosen. I was picked as lead designer for our kinect game, The Zodiac Race. It has an art style based off of origami and will be a self contained episode based off a portion of the zodiac legend. For research, I’ve drawn upon my movement background and looking at animals within nature. Also, I’ve been playing different Kinect games at the studio.
Kinect games have a tendency to haves good UI for players getting into the game or a really bad UI. Kinect Adventures and Sports have great UIs that allow the player to easily start their adventure or sport session. dance central plays well, but it’s menus are better managed through a controller. By far the worst game that I’ve played on kinect is Hole in the Wall. The graphics are abysmal, the gameplay stale, and the menus incorrigible. Off the top of my head, here are a few observations that I think make for a successful Kinect game:
1) Make it easy for the players to jump into the game!
It’s incredibly frustrating for a player when they can’t manage menus effectively. Kinect Adventures & Sports creates an easy, intuitive menu for players. The menus feature large icons for players that are easily accessible – using the right hand moves the on-screen cursor and when the player hovers on that icon a circle loads to visually indicate to the player that they are choosing this icon. Hole In the Wall has its menu options bunched together closely, which doesn’t translate to a quick menu experience. If the player moves their hand just a little, another menu icon is highlighted. While part of this may be due to the Kinect technology, the designers placed icons too close together with a result in which the wrong selection gets highlighted.
2) Avatars – To be or not to be?
There is feeling most satisfying when your real life movements are reflected by your cartoon self on the Xbox 360. It’s a special sci-fi moment to wave hello at the screen and see your avatar wave back at you. Also, it’s just really fun to mess around with those avatars and see what goofy stuff you can make them do. However, they serve an important purpose – they teach the player the extent of what the Kinect can recognize and how fast it processes their movement. Knowing their avatar’s limitations helps make the player a better Kinect gamer, and hopefully, have a richer experience. In games like Dance Central, the avatars are pre-generated and their movements fully choreographed and the player is given visual feedback via colors and messaging that let them know if they were flawless, ok, or just bad. The avatars don’t reflect the player’s movement, but within this context they serve as a teacher to the player: “Do these moves and you’ll be a fly, groovy dude. Follow my movements and you’ll get that high score and unlockables.” So the question of whether or not to use an Xbox avatar rests within what type of game it exists in. Games that require precise movements require a choreographed avatar. Games in which there is exists a simple set of movement phrases (such as ducking, dodging, moving side-to-side, etc), tend to have an avatar that mirror the player’s movement.
I’ve got other ideas, but I’ll post those at a later day. It’ll be about The Gunstringer and how it hurts your arm. 🙂
Josh Lee 