What Game to Choose?

Now it came time to brainstorm ideas for a novel game room. To help ideation, we went to visit Activate's Burlington location, so we could get a better feel for current game designs. After trying out all the game modes, we discussed our favourite rooms, and what elements they had in common. The team consensus was that laser, grid, and hide were the most enjoyable games. We found that the laser room and the hide room created a sense of urgency that added to the adrenaline of the game, making it more exciting. We really enjoyed the collaborative effort involved with the hide room. Finally, we found the mega grid room really visually appealing. With these aspects in mind, along with our criteria/constraints, we came up with a large brainstorm of potential game rooms:

Potential Room ideas:

• Bowling based game

  • Ski ball

  • Large scale pinball

  • Axe throwing

  • Football

• Ring toss game

• Balance game

• Wheelchair based Input

  • Use wheels to control mario party type games on the screen

    • race game

    • bump others off the platforms

    • chairbone champ

      • use one wheel to control pitch, one to control sound

    • puzzle games where you need to rotate shapes (one controls x rotation the other controls Y rotation

  • resistance like an exercise bike

  • proof of concept could be sufficient to make these chairs and an interface and use them to play modded mario party roms

  • Falling and manipulate the object to keep it falling

  • Slot car races

• Musical chairs

• Cooperative: sitting game

• Monkey bars

• Spinning laser like wipeout

• Laser connections using mirror

• Double Dutch jump rope

• Rope and swing everyone to one platform

  • George of the jungle room

• Protect game

  • (block the lasers / balls)

  • Throw balls at children and you protect the thing in the middle

  • Soccer based

• Pass an object around

• Physically push blocks around the room

  • stack blocks

  • Maze

  • How high you can stack something

From all our ideas, these 3 stuck out the most:

1. Protect

In this game, the excitement and adrenaline of a game of dodgeball is captured through an automated ball launcher and various sensors. Based on stakeholder analysis dodgeball was a common favorite game. This room will involve a ball launcher, a back wall sensor, a sensor to ensure players stay in a designated zone, and various other inputs for the players.

There are two main game modes, Protect and Dodge. For dodge the back wall sensor enables the system to be able to detect if a player has been struck by a ball or not. This will be done by applying physics to estimate the trajectory of the ball and determine where it should strike the back wall. If it does not strike the wall at the correct time or does not hit the right location this indicates it struck a player. This will determine whether a player successfully dodged. For Protect, the system will ensure that the player blocks all balls from hitting the back wall. For both games various difficulty levels can be augmented by adding additional tasks such as pressing buttons on the side wall or having the player interact with portions of the back wall.

2. Bars

In this game design, there are monkey bars lining the ceiling of the room. Other components in this room include handle sensors, buttons, floor detection system, and lasers. The modular bars have LED lights and touch sensors included.

There are various game modes that can be played here. One game design could be getting to the other side of room without touching certain bars shown in red and without touching the floor. Another game could be pattern recognition: seeing a sequence of bars lighting up and remembering that sequence to traverse the room. A final game idea could be territory claim: whoever touches the most bars and changes the color to their own wins the game.

3. Wheel

In this game, a wheelchair is used as a novel, unique input method. By having both direction and speed input, this can be a very flexible game room. This is augmented with foot inputs, buttons, and a display to make for a more immersive gaming experience.

There are a variety of game modes that can be played here. With multiple of these wheelchairs set up, there can be both collaborative and competitive games. E.g. racing, tracing games, puzzles. Anything that can use wheel direction and speed as inputs can be turned into a game. Resistance on the wheel can be used to vary difficulty and increase physical activity.

In order to determine the best idea, a design selection matrix was created to compare our various criterion. Based on this matrix, Protect game was chosen as our solution: