APD Week 5: Play and Forces

Context

The theme introduced in this week is orces. When Matt showed us some projects that have forces as a theme, it gave me lots of ideas and the most interesting for me is working with sound. This can be sound of wind, environment and etc. 

There are games using voice-controlled such as THE WUUUUUUUUUUUUU (https://headspider.itch.io/the-wuuuuuuuuuuuuuu). It is the game where you have to control the lift by continuing to make a sound. The longer you make, the higher the lift will be. It is a very simple mechanic yet hard to play. It is very challenging and keeps the player engaged as a player always try to beat their own high score or prove that they are better than the others (Madigan, 2016).

I think the voice-controlled game itself is already interesting enough to keep player engaged but since it is a part of Advanced Play Design unit I think I should go a bit further more by making it fun or funny to play. I had seen many voice-controlled games use screaming, whispering or even words such as jump and walk to control gameplay but haven’t seen anything like Can you drive across GTA 5, using ONLY your voice? (https://youtu.be/XvK4py0EE5s). In the video, a guy had set certain words for a certain command such as Dong for drive and Drake for moving backwards. It gave me an idea of using an opposite word to command character and it would be very funny.

Method

I am going to explore how to use voice to navigate character in Unity.

Response

I have downloaded a 2D platformer game asset from Unity asset store and put it in the scene. I researched how to make a game using voice-controlled on YouTube and there is plenty of them so I picked one and follow it. Apparently, I am a mac user and cannot access the voice recognition function in Unity because it made for Windows user only and this is very disappointing me. I tried to find a thread and discussion about this and there is one that will support mac. However, the asset was taken off the Unity Asset Store so there is no luck. Now it is time to go back to the basic. Using Key A,S,W,D to navigate the character. But I still have not changed my mind about swap the command yet so I did some couple experiments after I had done the basic command as well as you can see in the video.

Reflection

I am very disappointed that I could not make a voice-controlled game on Unity according to the platform issue. I did not expect that it will have a limit depends on which computer platform you are using. This would not happen if I have done some research before jump into the program and do it as it goes. Anyhow, the sense of humour that I swap keyboard command to control character is still funny to experiment. I got feedback from a player that it is weird but funny. The reason he is not laughing in the second experiment because he was very focusing on how to make it works. From both experiments, I learnt that after a player gets used to it, they will be able to play it easily but for the first experiment will be a lot easier for them to understand since it is just the opposite command.