Action in Motion is a student project team at the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center.  We’re creating a game that adapts hardcore action gameplay (specifically hack-and-slash) to full-body Kinect motion control, designing from the ground up around its strengths and limitations.

Playing a game with your body is fundamentally different from playing with a controller in several key ways.  While traditional buttons are an effective (actually underrated) way of controlling games, we formed this team because we feel motion control offers incredible opportunities to heighten player immersion and increase expressive freedom/agency, if we can invent or discover the right combination of techniques and mechanics.

About the Project

We began last semester as a student-pitched project focused on just creating a tech demo demonstrating basic motion-controlled combat, with a particular focus on researching controlled animation blending and gesture detection techniques to augment the player’s body motion by incorporating hand-authored animation.  We put together this video at the end of last semester describing our results:

The team pitched a follow-up project, with a focus shift towards creating combat mechanics and enemy behaviors that turn last semester’s insights into something truly fun to play.  This is that project.  Please follow our progress on our development blog!