Alternate Inputs

Lately I have been very interested in alternate inputs for gaming. Perhaps its my desire to make Wii games. Maybe its just how great the webcam support for Live Messenger is.

Since I make games for kids, I thought I was try to make games that cater to what kids like to do... spaz out and make noise.

This demo shows how the more movement a webcam sees, the faster your character onscreen moves. Notice the little iconic guy next to the webcam image, he tells you what to do (this is rough, of course) but I think its important to constantly message what the kids should be doing.

(You must have a webcam!)
Adam vs. Jake: Monkey Climb

In a "real game" the AI would be very friendly. The motion capture code would need to compensate for the min/max a camera could capture. I would detect large gaps of inaction and message that the player needs to get moving!

I love the idea of a kid jumping up and down in front of the computer to play a game.

The core motion code came from Guy Watson's article on Adobe.

More Games

This post is a bit late buy there are some new games from the CN team.

KND game
I like seek/flee behaviors and I like zombies. Imagine my elation when I was tasked to make a game based on the K.N.D. movie that had zombies in it!

The design idea was this: You have a grenade which can "unzombify" fellow zombified KND operatives. You must manage the zombies with your stun gun during the grenade's recharge time. Zombies can touch operatives to turn them into zombies.
Outnumbuh'd

Juniper Lee game
I have always wanted to make a platform game. I finally got to design one. While I believe it turned out too difficult I am still very happy with it. The design was much too large but... well, it's a long story involving office politics. I would like to re-visit it and tune the difficulty down.

The design idea was you earn new abilites as you go and all these abilites can chain into one another. Revisit previous levels which your new abilites to access goodies.
Out of Charm's Way

Quite a few of the games I am working on now won't be released for a long time so it was nice to see these launched.