Myo game update 4

Last week I completed the first version of the Myo game prototype, now titled “Echo of Heroes”.

The game was a lot more simple than I imagined because I wanted it to be as simple as possible for players to get the hang of in a testing environment.

I even made an A4 poster for it:

Sword

 

The game was made for a research report about how a fun game could be made from using Myo and without visual feedback. The reason for this is mainly because of the ability to play a game without having to engage your visual senses, and thereofre making it a better platform for exercise routines on mobiles. The Myo uses bluetooth and can be taken outside, so the game is going to end up being a larger game like Zombies, Run!, and incorporate missions and jogging. 

The way I put it together was with 2 main pieces of technology plyus some clever audio design.

20141008231112

The screenshot shows how the games’ “colliders” are put together. These are basically what Unity3D calls “things that if other things overlap with, things happen”. These are built into Unity, and can be easily utilized. The way the game uses these is when the player swings his or her arm wearing the Myo arm band and if a pretend sword collider overlaps with the capsual in front of them, it registers a hit.This is the same with the collider above the sword (in the screenshot), but is used for “blocking”. If the user has his or hand up in the air high enough it will collide with that flat box and can trigger the player blocking.

The way I conveyed the game state was a big loud voice echoing thoguh your headphones saying “haha, this is the end of the line, you tiny little speck” to signify that there’s a big bad monster in front of you. The big boss attacks, and this is identified by a climbing “reverse sword clang” sound effect stretched out over about 3 seconds and at the end if the player is blocking, it makes a “clang” sound, otherwise a “bash” sound and a type of buzzer sound to identify that the player has been hit and this is bad. The player attacks the boss by waiting for him to swing and as soon as he hits the player’s block, the player has 1 second to react by swinging his or her sword at the boss. If it hits, you hear a “ouch” sound from the boss, and if not, you hear a bad buzzer and a clang noise, like you are hitting the boss’s shield.

The Myo’s SDK was easy to import into Unity because they have bundled with it a package that lets you easily set up the environment. 

After studying binaural sound a little bit, I ran into a Unity plugin (free for students) called 3Dception by Two Big Ears.  This also came with an easy Unity package.

One of the clever things I implemented was the audio handling. because Unity allows 1 sound emitter per transform, I had to create a bunch of these transforms and attach sound to them. I added them all to a parent called “Sounds”, and referenced this to the game’s logic handling object. I then added to the logic object a sound manager function where I would only need to call “PlaySound(“Hurt”) for example to get it to play a sound. The function would basically search for the child by the name passed into the function and then play the sound on that object. This works well and makes future code more usable.

I also used the 3Dception audio for the sword position by having it constantly play a fire loop. The swinging sound was also played when the player swings the sword (mentioned in a previous article on how I did this). The binaural natrure of the sound made it feel like the sword was where it was in game. To test this with the users, I added one of the questions on the survey that asked this. About half of the people that did the survey said that they could tell, but it is not a vwery useful result as I did not explain to them that it was an advanced feature and they could have understood the feature as a difference to mono sound for example. To properly test this, the uisers would have needed to kjnow a bit about the issues wjth sound positioning in real life and how the ear is clever enough to know where sounds are coming from. They would also need to have a “good ear” as in, know the difference between normal stereo sound positioning in most games, and the binaural feature. 

However, there was a discussion I was involved in online about the binaural technique and was made aware of even more technology. It would be a good idea to study this further and compare different solutions.

George

Some problems I ran into in regards to the game was that the player had to firstly tell the Myo which direction the boss was. This is because the Myo’s absolute position is sent to the game, and it could be on any angle. This was half incorporated into the Unity package that came with the Myo, but it needed to be made usable in the game and disabled so that a user doesn’t accidentally activate it. The way I approached this was simply ask them to spread their fingers at the beginning of the game, while holding their hand to show them where to point it. This worked well except at some points the Myo did not register the finger spread gesture, and I was unable to do it myself without having to take the Myo off their arm and re-set it on my own. 

Another issue was when users tested the game, they had to sync the Myo with their body. Traditionally, this was a painfully long process of performing gestures, but they improved it to simply doing a “setup gesture” which was waving your hand away and then rotation your arm in the same direction. This was still difficult to explain to people, even with a picture showing them what to do. 

 Overall the results showed that despite the technical issues, the game was fun, but needed some sort of tutorial sequence to get the player used to the game. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *