DESCRIPTION:
* How to Ride Your Dragon is based off the 2010 feature film How to Train Your Dragon. It is an amusement-park style game in which you ride on the back of Toothless the dragon as you fly through an environment while staying on rails (you are constantly moving forward). This Unity game implements the Microsoft Kinect as players use gestures to move up, down, left, and right through cloud rings to score points.
* How to Ride Your Dragon is based off the 2010 feature film How to Train Your Dragon. It is an amusement-park style game in which you ride on the back of Toothless the dragon as you fly through an environment while staying on rails (you are constantly moving forward). This Unity game implements the Microsoft Kinect as players use gestures to move up, down, left, and right through cloud rings to score points.
DURATION:
* Two weeks.
TEAM SIZE:
* Five people: two artists, two producers/designers, and me the lonely programmer.
PRELUDE:
* This is another one of FIEA's "rapid prototype" games which was designed from scratch in two weeks. Our teams were randomly assigned. We had to present the game twice before the class at interim and at the final class. The theme of this assignment was intellectual properties. We unanimously agreed on How To Train Your Dragon and the theme park ride concept of riding Toothless was pitched, hence the slightly altered name of How to Train Ride Your Dragon. We thought it was "easy" to do a theme park ride at first but broke our backs to make a complete product at the 11th hour so never underestimate any project...especially if it involves Unity. But I made some good friends on this game so the team synergy was awesome.
PERSONAL GOALS / ACHIEVEMENTS:
* Learned a great deal about the Unity editor. Learned how to map Kinect gestures to key inputs.
* Getting Toothless to move through a series of nodes in 3D space. There are a series of 50-something nodes that Toothless travels through in a certain order. Picture it as a single linked list. Each node also contains information about how Toothless travels to the next node such as speed, linear interpolation (how quickly Toothless turns to face the next node), and relative X and Y boundaries (how much room Toothless has to "move" during this section). For instance, using the speed variable, Toothless may walk slowly up to a ledge, hit a node that tells him to move fast, and dive to the ocean. Just create constants in the Unity code that others can edit in the Unity editor on the fly and playtest instantly.
* Even though Toothless follows a path, he needs to move in a relative 2D space (up-down-left-right) in order to induce some feeling of free roam. Use some of Unity's collision to ensure he doesn't get stuck moving up and down. Also if Toothless hits an object head-on, he bounces back for just a second while remaining on course. This required some playtesting to make sure the hit box was just right and that players couldn't "break" the game by falling through the level geometry or nonsense like that.
* I didn't create any of the art assets for the game but I did have some involvement in level design. This meant placing the path nodes in the right "route" for Toothless to take through the level with fast and slow moments like a roller coaster. Also created the cloud ring entities that award points if Toothless flies through them, tallied up the score at the end, and displayed a letter grade depending on how well you did. Score = number of rings acquired - how many times you got knocked back.
* Getting Toothless to move through a series of nodes in 3D space. There are a series of 50-something nodes that Toothless travels through in a certain order. Picture it as a single linked list. Each node also contains information about how Toothless travels to the next node such as speed, linear interpolation (how quickly Toothless turns to face the next node), and relative X and Y boundaries (how much room Toothless has to "move" during this section). For instance, using the speed variable, Toothless may walk slowly up to a ledge, hit a node that tells him to move fast, and dive to the ocean. Just create constants in the Unity code that others can edit in the Unity editor on the fly and playtest instantly.
* Even though Toothless follows a path, he needs to move in a relative 2D space (up-down-left-right) in order to induce some feeling of free roam. Use some of Unity's collision to ensure he doesn't get stuck moving up and down. Also if Toothless hits an object head-on, he bounces back for just a second while remaining on course. This required some playtesting to make sure the hit box was just right and that players couldn't "break" the game by falling through the level geometry or nonsense like that.
* I didn't create any of the art assets for the game but I did have some involvement in level design. This meant placing the path nodes in the right "route" for Toothless to take through the level with fast and slow moments like a roller coaster. Also created the cloud ring entities that award points if Toothless flies through them, tallied up the score at the end, and displayed a letter grade depending on how well you did. Score = number of rings acquired - how many times you got knocked back.
MEDIA:
Gameplay Footage.
LINKS:
