CHICKEN RUN

Course: Building Virtual Worlds

Goal: Build a virtual world for the ETC Festival in three weeks. Consider guest experience, participation, and room theming in the design process.

Pitch: Why did the chicken cross the road? To find love! Flap your wings as quickly as possible and avoid obstacles to reach the hen first, in this two-player competitive game.

Team: Mollie Braley (Producer + Sound Designer), Daryl Choa (Artist), Xiao He (Programmer), Saumya Lahera (Programmer), and Conor Triplett (Artist).

Responsibilities: Designed all 2D/3D art assets, including character models, environment models, and interface icons.

Platform: Kinect.

Project Summary: During Week 1, we used Phidgets and Makey-Makey as our platform. In the original game design, the goal was to woo a hen by collecting as many roses as possible in two minutes. The guest had to cross a street , pick up roses along the way, and avoid being hit by cars. To move forward, the guest had to flap a wing containing a force Phidget against the side of their body. To pick up a rose, the guest had to peck a rose (with Makey-Makey attached) with a foam beak that they wore on their face. In this iteration, we had difficulty building an intuitive interface for rotation that stayed within the theme of the world. In addition, the gameplay of avoiding cars was too difficult for the guest to accomplish.

In Week 2, we added on an additional platform, Kinect, to handle rotation. We also changed the playing field to have the hen sit in the center of an intersection, we reduced the frequency and speed of cars, and added in another player for competitive gameplay. However, in this iteration we struggled with mapping the rotation of guests’ bodies to the rotation of the chicken. We also found that guests were able to hack the game by holding the force Phidget down continuously through the game.

During Week 3, we moved all of our interactions to Kinect, and changed our gameplay to a race. This eliminated our need to design for rotation, and instead focus our efforts on creating interactions that were more chicken-like. To move forward, guests had to flap their arms, and to move left or right, guests had to shift side-to-side. The goal was to get to the hen first by avoiding obstacles (rocks and mud) and picking up speed boosts (roses) along the way. We removed pecking entirely since it was counterintuitive to gameplay.