Studio 3 - Week 1

This week we had our first taste of one of the projects we will be working on over this next 13 weeks. The material design brief consists of 3 briefs which we choose one of to work on for the allotted time. The first is to design a small game and specific controller for said game, secondly using a massively manufactured controller in a different way and finally making a game with micro computers like Arduinos which are completely self contained. Since I had been keeping track of the previous trimesters student work I was well aware that this project was happening, which lead me to concept some ideas over the holidays. Boy did all of those go out the window quickly. Part of our in class time was to find a game on Shake that Button which would satisfy every brief and then come up with an idea of our own. Personally for me I didn’t find this as valuable as I could have, I struggled to find games to fit the criteria and then once I had found one that did fit I just ran with it even though the game and even the style didn’t interest me at all.

After this though the first idea I came up with was a small escape room style game where the controller was a small bookcase which the players would have to solve in game puzzles by selecting the correct books to pull. All of the books would be hinged to the case and the back end of each book would be resting on a button, when the player pulled the book forward the game would then receive the information and give the player feedback in game on whether they had made the right choice. After discussing it with the class it was pivotal to hear how this could possibly just become a guessing game and there's no real value in that so it was either rework it or back to the drawing board.

I remembered back to what I believed was the most successful game from last trimester which was the game where you rolled out play doh snakes by rolling some pipe in your hands. It was the simplicity mixed with the frantic action and player interaction which made it so great. So back to Shake that button I headed, until I came across a game which fulfilled those things I had just discovered were the criteria for what I personally wanted. The game Shcocooococo where you use bottles with pump lids to squirt soap bubbles out of birds onto germs immediately caught my eye. The product they had used being pump bottles of various shapes and sizes were cheap and easy to obtain while mixing it with some strong player action with the pumping it seemed like a massive hit. This lead me to brainstorm with one of my friends and also look online at some dollar stores to see what household objects were cheap enough and possibly sturdy enough to turn into a controller. I really liked the idea of using a small globe and getting players to spin the globe as hard and fast as they could. The way this will interact with the pc game will be that there is a arena with 2 balls and as the player spin their globes they build up energy in their ball, once the timer is reached the balls unleash their built up force and shoots across the arena at the other and hopefully bounce off each other like yoga balls. The ball that can knock the opponent further off the arena wins. The physical controller will only need two cheap globes which after research are both under $20 and then a sensor which can sense rotation, similar the the snake game from last trimester. I believe this would showcase really well as players would be competing and the controllers would be stationary as to not endanger any users. I look forward to pitching this one in class next week and keep posted here for updates on the project.