Assignment 4 : Last week

    This is the last post and the last week of the fourth XRD assigment. Next week we will present mainly this assignment, and if there is time we will also present the previous three assignments as well. Out of all of them, this last one has been the most problematic, due to the unclear direction of where the project is going, as well as us trying to implement too many ideas. Because of that, some features that we talked about in previou posts might not be present anymore, as we took the time to polish the most important ones. Luckly, the idea we started from is the same and the start and end are as we wanted. 

    Gesture recognition was the main method of interacting with the game and it still is. No controllers are used at any point in the project. Locomotion and object interaction are all done using the users hands. I will start explaing how each was achieved, what has been taken out of the game and go through the progression of the current version of the game.   

    Locomotion happens when the user pushes a "button" on the left hand that makes the player move towards the direction he is facing. The left hand can still be used to interact with objects, like a flashlight as you can se in the video below. This part of the project has been one of the most problematic from an implementation point of view and from a design one as well, as most of the solutions before were making the left hand unusable besides movements. Previous ideas included teleportation, but that methods had a terrain bug and the placeholder for the next teleportation location was always under the map. Another idea included using gestures to move, but the problem with that several gestures could be confused and it did not work properly. 

    Regarding the puzzles, we decided to get rid of some due to time constrains and focus more on the gesture part. The reason to have more puzzles was to increase the gameplay time, but as it was not bringing anything interesting into the game we decided to just scrap them. 

    In order to make the gesture part relevant to the game idea, we decided to use them in order to make show the player the path he needs to take in order to find a way to get rid of the monster following him. The way to get rid of the monster is just a simple plain gun that we tried to make it be used like a real life gun, reload, cocking the gun and all, but we scrapped that as well so we can at least finish the version we have now. 

    Said version contains the flashlight and battery part, following the gesture arrows and killing the monster at the end. For the sake of the video we increased the brightness of the game so the flashlight might seem a bit useless. Music has been added for the ambience, and a end game at the end to inform the player that "this is it". Considering the amount of issues we encountered during this assignment, we think that in the end it evolves in complexity over the previous assignments and has a better gameplay structure. 


Github repository:  

https://github.com/Cata011/XRDFourthAssignment

Video demonstration: 


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