Baby Baby Baby OHHH!
A little baby is playing in the park, but the evil dog is chasing her and the birds are trying to attack her! Fortunately, the butterflies are here and want to help her! Can you guide the butterflies to help the baby return to her baby cart safe and sound?
Producer/Sound Designer: Yu-Chen Chang (Larry)
Programmer: KangLei Fang (K), Joseph Chiang (Joseph)
Artist: Hye Jeon Jeong (Gina), Cheng Li (Aaron)
Gameplay Video:
Development Process:
The topic of this round is "Helping others", and our team decided to reference some amazing games we have played before as the beginning of our ideation process. And we came up with the game: Good Night Mr. Snoozleberg, as our core idea. After that, we decided to use the protect mechanism inside, but change the settings to a human life, which will contains 4 different levels: protect new born baby from threats, protect youngsters from bad habits, protect teenagers avoiding alcohol and drug, and protect adults to life-twisting events. Since we are assigned to use Kinect 1 as our platform, we then decided that we will use hands to control two helpers, and try to avoid anything dangerous happened during the game.
However, we suddenly realized that two weeks are not enough to complete all levels. We decided to focus on baby phase first, and complete other levels if we have time. Larry came up with the idea of a careless mom forgot her child in the park, Gina then created the according art to give us a concrete idea. As a team, we voted and decided to use butterfly as our helper considering the background environment. K and I immediately start to code in Unity to make sure everything can run as our plan. On the other hand, Aaron take care of animating the static arts Gina provided.
During the interim, we recieved some valuable feedback about how to improve our game with tutorials (since we have to teach players how to correctly control butterflies). But before that, we have completed 3 different threats: trampoline, chasing dog and bird attack.
K and I as programmers, learned how to collaborate with each other immediately after the first art piece came out. Mainly K handled the Kinect input and transmit to Unity, I took the data sent into Unity and calculated by C# code and implemented the game flow. This ensured that we have a very high working efficiency and hence we could added up another threat into our game in just two days.
To stitch the butterfly, we make sure each interactable objects contains a Kinect object: a class defined to allow player to interact with it. We assume that player will never go back (this assumption is further confirmed to be always true by letting baby automatically going forward), so each object will only be picked up by player once, and release once. Most parts in the game is working pretty well, EXCEPT for the trampoline. It took us a long time to figure out where should we put the camera at during trampoline level. Fortunately, after we tried a few methods, letting camera move only if trampoline reach the current camera borders worked out very well. Until now, all programming issues have been solved. All we need to do is waiting for art assets to come in.
With the background music, which perfectly fit into our game, from Larry, and amazing story art by Gina, our team is able to finish our game decently. We got everything working, along with superb art and music. All these made us very confident about our game and can't wait to see the final outcome.
On the day presenting the game, we received almost all postive feedback from our classmates and advisors. I believe this is one of the most successful game in round 1 this year.