Gunstringer : Be the puppet master with KINECT

kinect

July 23rd, 2011 at 4:59 pm -

Designed for KINECT Gaming System, Gunstringer matches Twisted Pixel’s beloved storytelling, characters, and polish with fresh gameplay mechanics. Gamers can puppeteer a main character through a variety of 3D and 2D gameplay styles. Players can control every jump and dodge with one hand, while filling enemies with lead using the other. “Gunstringer Video Game“ offers KINECT shooting experiences to play without controllers. Some of the more interesting control schemes includes :

Double-handed Marionetting - Originally we went for something more “realistic” in giving the player two marionette handles to move the Gunstringer around. It was partially to get us more accuracy when moving around, and also to provide some interesting string based movement like pulling your hands apart to jump.It became obvious pretty quickly that the Kinect was way more accurate than we expected, which removed the need for that second arm information. The other thing that made us switch to one hand was…

Gun drawing/holstering – We still needed a way to fire when you were steering with two hands, so we implemented a system where you moved your right hand down to your “holster” to draw your weapon, then shoot your targets, then reholster to move again.While it was pretty cool unholstering a gun and having a target show up, the friction for changing states between moving and shooting was way too huge, and it put big limits on the kind of gameplay we could do since you couldn’t move and shoot at the same time. So, once we got movement onto one hand, it died a very quick death.

Full control platforming – Platforming was the last thing that came together. Originally we allowed you to emulate a controller’s left and right movement with your left hand, but it sucked. The biggest lesson we learned here is that inertial controls like those on a joypad just don’t work for non-centered controls like Kinect aiming or mouse movement. From that point, we tried to focus on 1:1 analog movement models as much as possible like having your arm’s position dictate the Gunstringer’s position rather than his velocity.