For this assignment my team looked at creating a game that had the ability to bring people together in the real world by creating communication and interaction. This was based on the idea that as technology has evolved throughout the world, people have been pushed further away from each other with things like the internet and social networking taking away from everyday real life interaction. The idea for this is built upon our previous project aMaze, in which we made to also solve this problem.
Our game we created to combat this problem is Shape Me. In this game players will act together to try and act out shapes on a screen - however, only one player will see the screen so they have to communicate what they see to the other player to be triumphant.
We started with research and some case studies, as we wanted to make sure we knew what have and have not worked before in creating communication between people. As well as reflect and understand what went wrong on our previous attempt to get people to communicate, this helped us better understand what we would have to do to make a better game and artifact that creates communication.
From there we went about creating our game, initially we looked at a few early game ideas, but pretty quickly found our game idea in the form of Shape Me, this was chosen due to research and case studies we had done, seen in my contextual statement. Our process making our game used an iterative design methodology. Whilst we had some setbacks that didn’t allow us to stick to our timeframe as much as we would have liked, it still allowed us to evolve our game from an idea to polished artefact. We used the depth image from the Kinect to pick up people and create silhouettes within the game.
We used play tests to reveal what we needed to work on and fix. Which revealed many problems and iteration points, including but not limited to, users ability to cheat the system by standing next to each other, the score and timer to get people would need to work together to beat the score, communication ended up being a sort of one way street, and the fact that people acting the shape would lose interest as there was no feedback upon them moving other than what the other player communicates.
A lot of these came with logical fixes, including adding an area around the shape to check cheaters and adding a mouse in which the communicating user had to press when they think the other user has made the shape, with a light showing the acting player if they had made the shape.
I believe in the end our project came out pretty good and works better as a artifact that encourages communication and overall better as a game than our previous attempt aMaze. As the knowledge we learned from that helped us shape and iterate on this project.
The technical difficulties that caused us to be behind on our set timetable really hurt our production. While we did get to play test to the point where we believe our project works as a game, more play testing would have been preferred with a larger public play test environment ideally, as this can be seen within some aspects of our game, including a problem with people with massively different heights, as the shapes were made at a averaged height, some people could be too short for some shapes. While our solution was to include props that would help shorter people, ideally if I had more time this would be something I would like to fix, with possibly differing levels based on how tall the player is.
I really like how this project got me to think and reflect more on previous project in a way I had not done before. It showed me how much of an impact play testing can the outcome of a game as our final project has changed a lot from our initial concept, all based on play testing done. As well as the significance a shared goal can have in creating and building social interaction and communication.
