Kinect Artillery

You fasten the grip around your gun and
check your shield once again: Everything’s fine.
You’re ready.

Will you shoot down your enemy?
Or collect enough stars to win?

Whatever you goal is, do your best to win in Kinect Artillery!

Download it for Windows!
You’ll also need the Kinect for Windows Runtime.

I’m quite proud with how that turned out. Obviously we didn’t write all the code in the 9 hour timeframe, but I think it’s still an impressing feat to pull off – and it plays fine. While it’s a bit awkward to turn to the side, seeing your silhouette following your motions is very satisfying, and the general look works surprisingly well.

Credits:

• Programming: Tobias Wehrum, Heiko Weible
• Art: Jana Leinweber
• Music: Kevin MacLeod
• Sound: Moritz Ufer

As the theme of this month’s EGP and the name suggest, you don’t do this my mashing franatically on your keyboard, but but by making sounds, recorded by your microphone. I hope you have one. :)

The dragon will either follow the PITCH of the sounds you make (which I prefer), be it by singing, whistling or by playing an instrument, or the VOLUME (which is fun too, though the game should then rather be called Screaming At Dragons).

I’m ambivalent how this one came out. Gameplay-wise it is not top-notch, and the pitch is often off (especially when not using an instrument), on the other side I think that it shows the key-concept rather well.

I guess I’m (heavily) over 7 days, I didn’t always work day-to-day and didn’t count the time – but since the topic “pitch recognition” wasn’t too easy and required some fiddling with calibration and configuration, not to speak about the keyless interface, the overtime is understandable I guess.

The pitch recognition itself is working fairly well – good enough for a prototype, though I would’ve hoped that it worked better with humming. Oh, well.

For this game I used C++ with my beloved SFML and FMOD as sound framework.

For those interested, here is the source code in form of an Eclipse CDT Project: Source Code (New BSD License).

And here we go for another (last minute) entry for the Experimental Gameplay Project! This month: Rejection.

Well, it is more a prototype than a game, but I will call it “game” anyway, simply because it sounds better this way. :)

Anyway, in the game you will be tested if you are good enough for The Job. It is sort of an art game, and it isn’t really good. To say anything more would be a spoiler, only so much: Yes, this game has an end.

Fun facts about the game:

• Due to time constraints, I changed the concept at least 3 times. (Which might be the reason why it’s hard to solve. Or why it isn’t any fun. Like, at all.)
• Since this is my first plattformer, I learnt much stuff about how they are developed. Or rather, how they aren’t. And when I think about it, it doesn’t really have any platforms, although the engine would allow it. Hu.
• None of my recruted-in-a-hurry beta testers could beat the game without help.
• Don’t try to insert artsy messages at last minute. It simply doesn’t work.

Oh, and some useful facts:

• This time my engine of choice was the Simple and Fast Multimedia Library – great thing!
• Developing editors is hard. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t found this great tutorial on gametuto.com

Here’s a screenshot:

Edit: Since this prototype wasn’t any fun at all, I decided to stop wasting everyones time and took the download down. I suggest you head over to the fine other games I have here at the blog!