Theme
Play & force
Context
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHH2101OFfI
During the lecture, Matt has mentioned “don’t depict the force, use the force” and described “force” as “an external ‘element’ that drives a change of state”. This made me think of the flappy bird, which is a game that manipulates gravity as a material in the game that the players are constantly experiencing the gravitational force and they have to tap to give an upward force to the bird to avoid the obstacles. This gave me the inspiration to play with gravity and make a game.
Method
The game is made in Unity and programmed with C#. The sprites were created last semester and I reused them.
Respond
My first idea was to make a game where the two players are experiencing a gravitational force and they have a strong upthrust force. They have to keep themselves within the view of the camera. They cannot touch the ground and cannot go out of the “ceiling”. Who stays alive for longer will be the winner. When I tested that with my brother, we found it quite easy to keep ourselves within the frame after we get adapted to take the balance between the strong upthrust force and gravitational force.
Then, I tried to add more “external force” to the players by adding some obstacles that keep floating across the screen and the players cannot collide on them. In the “advance” mode. The players need to avoid from reaching both the ceiling, ground and the obstacles to stay alive. This time, the game is much more difficult. Three obstacles at different heights were added for the first trial. However, it seems unfair for the player near the side when the bottom obstacle comes out. Thus, I removed the bottom obstacle and the game seems fairer after that.
This week's work sits in both the social play which strengthens the connection between players and object play which requires the players to use sequences of hand-eye manipulations.
Reflection
I did think about making it a single-player game in the beginning. If it’s going to be a single-player game, we can record the time that a player survives and let the player break his/her record. During this self-quarantine period, I changed my mind to make it a two-player game that players complete to survive longer.
This type of co-located multiplayer game is a type of social play that besides interacting with the game, the players interact among themselves. On the other hand, the touch-based interactions facilitate a kinesthetic form of play. Since both players have to operate on the same keyboard and device, this creates a physical constraint that often mediates indirect body contact between players. (Goddard et al.,2016)
In terms of further improvement of the game, we found that it takes some time for the computer to process and start the game. We did not know when the game was going to start literally. A good way to solve this problem is to introduce a countdown before the game starts.
References
Goddard, W, Garner, J, and Jensen, M. Designing for Social Play in Co-located Mobile Games (2016). Web.
< https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2843043.2843476 >
The game build for MAC
Instructions:
Press the buttons on keyboard
"D" for the dog on the left to jump
"L" for the dog on the right to jump
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1z4Zv-9FZF9s2Xa-JN3E5CTjjE2RqRjdL