Eggs and Obsticles

Unfortunately we were unable to put these into the game but these are the eggs and what the log obstacles would look like

In Situ

So in the end our game would be situated in an airport terminal - here is a little drawing to illustrate our idea further

Poster to advertise Game

Rationale

When considering a concept for our game, we decided first on a context and a brand – airport terminals and Air New Zealand. When we think of an airport terminal, it conjures up quite a different picture from the Air New Zealand brand image. Sleepy travellers and grumpy businessmen are in stark contrast to the friendly hospitable feel of the “Kiwiana”-based Air New Zealand brand. To bring travellers at airports together and relieve their boredom, we decided to create an interactive game, using Kinect. This would get waiting travellers off their seats and doing some physical activity, as well as encourage some friendly competition.

The game itself is an infinite runner game, similar to the popular smartphone game Temple Run. We decided that in order to properly parallel Air New Zealand’s visual language and promotional imagery, the game would be set in native New Zealand bush. Aesthetically, this is continued throughout the game, with a landscape visible from every screen. In the game, the player is represented by a Kiwi, with the objective being to collect the Kiwi’s eggs.

For the hand-in, we decided that keyboard controls would be more realistic than setting it up with a Kinect sensor. However if the game was to be placed in context, this is the track it would be taken down. Multiple players would have the ability to participate using multiple Kinect sensors, but they would be playing the same game, competing against each other.

Building the game

In order to produce the game we used the opsive infinite runner starter pack. This layed a framework and gave some startup modules, models and levels to base your game upon. This is a screenshot of what the game looked like before we started to modify it.

http://www.opsive.com/assets/InfiniteRunnerStarterPack/

Here you can see the custom kiwi character that we tried to import into the game. This actually worked but there was an error that we ran out of time to fix, where the character seemed to fall through the platform that the runner goes down in the game. We also built animations of the character jumping, dying along with small idle animations for when the character was still and of course a run cycle.

Here you can see the kiwi spawned in the game, and the issue of it spawing above the platform then falling into it.

We also custom edited the existing GUI replacing the fonts, and trying to create a layout that suited our brief. Although we had a whole custom UI designed, we ran out of time to actually implement this into the game.

 Here you can see one of the issues we had with spawning objects, the game itself ran on probabilities, and through a glitch that happened (still not sure what happened) these were spawning far too regularly. We had initially wanted to place tree stumps and braches which we modeled, but this bug along with the coin bug meant that in the final I just left out this asset in order to present a less annoying scenario. For some reason the character would not die on impact of objects which was another bug we were yet to iron out.

Here you can see the coin glitch, the coins that we were to replace with eggs for the kiwi to pickup.

What was successful in the same was the level design, we managed to get the straight mapping in as you can see above and the game is actually generating this as you move through. We had planned to use corners, but what happened was we had the platforms generating so you could have turns, but when the level tried to spawn on it (the corner models that is) it would just either crash the game, or spawn way too many copies of the corner around the platform.

Development

Game Play

As our game is created on Unity - with the coding behind it means that it not really possible to draw out the game plan as each block is randomly generated.