What we did:
This week 3D Crumbs have poured all of our resources into prototyping interaction mechanics. Our team has prototyped a variety of 15 different interaction mechanics. From these 15 interactions we have narrowed down to 3 distinct mechanics, the first one uses the Tango device as you are pulling a slingshot, much like playing Angry Birds but using first person perspective and shooting in the 3D space.
The second one utilizes height information to create two different worlds in our game. For example, we used sea level in our prototype, when users raise the tablet above their chest, they can see above the water; when below, they can see the underwater world. And while in different worlds, players can have distinct inputs.
The tired one applies a virtual joystick controller on the screen to control your virtual character, with the third-person perspective to solve the puzzle.
We spent two days at Google for the Project Tango Game Developer Day, it was totally amazing! We learned plenty helpful knowledge through the talks and seeing other developers creation on the Tango device.
The challenges we encountered:
We spent two days trying to create a game based on the slingshot shooting mechanic, but it turned out to be confusing and not fun to play with as a core mechanic of the game. We also discovered that the most amazing moment for people that first use Tango is that when you look at the virtual world on the tablet, it shows information respecting your real-world environment. The feeling is powerful. Our next step is to keep the shooting mechanic but just using tap to shoot. And incorporate more on applying depth data and area learning techniques to create our game world using the scanned data.
Plans for next week:
We will have ETC faculty and guests visit us during Wednesday for quarters walkaround. By using this chance, we can get more feedback and insights on our game prototype and art direction. We then will make adjustments and keep developing our game from there.
