Two Generic Princesses

Improvements for the Future

Balance

The princess' attacks with the Xbox controllers might be considered too "spammable". There will be a natural physical cooldown associated with the Kinect and a cooldown limited by mental prowess for the MIDI player.

A built-in creativity boost for the Kinect and MIDI controllers rewards enthusiastic play. The purpose of the boost was to discourage players from spamming a single combination or gesture many times in a row, as that would make it quite boring to watch someone play the game. Thus, if the player controlling the warrior were to swipe with his left hand for a sword slash, and then swiped with his right hand, that second attack would carry a damage bonus for using different sides of the body. We were toying with the idea of a more advanced pattern recognition -- for the Kinect side to recognize long sequences of attacks being performed in a cycle, and for the musical input to recognize aesthetically pleasing strings of notes and award even more damage for such combinations. Spamming a single note for all three units of a spell will result in a subpar damage output, so the witch player has an incentive to plan new sequences for each spell.

The state machine inside a state machine was a bit complicated, so sometimes enemies don't perform optimally. We compensated by giving them faster movespeeds, but with the introduction of the MIDI and Kinect hardware to slow the princesses down, these enemies should revert to their slower speeds.

Graphical User Interface

If we were to implement a HUD, it would include character health bars and some way to track the elements being charged on the witch's wand. We should also improve the current status effect indicators, instead using a tint function to render the affected character with a slight overlay of whatever color the status effect is.

Hardware

The exciting portion of the user interface could not be featured at this stage. 2GP was initially designed with two additional controllers in mind: the Microsoft Kinect and a MIDI keyboard. The Kinect would augment the warrior's gameplay, and the MIDI keyboard would augment the witch's. Before development on the game began, one of the developers of 2GP created an application to record and identify poses and gestures with the Kinect.

This was smoothly integrated into the game after only a month into its production. Using the Kinect, the player who controlled the warrior princess could slice the air with his arm to activate the sword attack, crouch down to the ground to start a roll, perform an overhand throw to launch the boomerang, and hold a leg out to the side of his body to do a sweep kick. We tested on several different variations of the recorded poses and found that it would recognize even the most half-assed crouch as a roll. The application was unique in that it tracked only the joints of the body which were important to the pose, and it allowed for recognition of either side of the body; a player wouldn't have to match a punch pose with his entire body, just his left or right arm.

Microsoft decided it was time to bring the Kinect SDK out of beta shortly after its inclusion in our code, which meant updated libraries and drivers, and total incompatability with our existing application. In order to meet other deadlines, we postponed the Kinect integration indefinitely.

The MIDI keyboard was intended to replace all the buttons of the Xbox controller for the witch princess. Players would be able to play notes to charge their wand and cast spells. We were able to capture MIDI input and decode the packets of data into note names, but the implementation will have to be multithreaded to work with the existing code in the game. The spellcast functions are encapsulated and ready to be called by the MIDI system once it's integrated with the game .