ALASTAIR VALLANCE
Into the Arena
Into the Arena is one of my favourite pieces of Design work that has sparked my love of interaction design and creating Games that insure fun and natural control. Not only that, but being able to mess around and create a game based around two of my favourite TV Shows "Robot Wars" and "Battlebots" was an incredible amount of fun.
Assignment Submission
Into the Arena Game
Process
Designing to the Brief
The task set for this assignment was to create a game that uses at least two different modalities to control the game itself. To create the game, I selected Speech recognition and using the Keyboard and mouse combination as the two modalities.
Inspired by the way drivers in shows like Battlebots communicate with their team to control their machines, the speech modality would be used to control the weapons system. The original concept would be to create a sandbox arena and a Pinball competition arena (Based off of a classic era Robot Wars side competition). The sandbox arena would allow for players to place objects around the arena to hit, flip or smash. Voice commands are also used to control the arena obstacles made famous in the show. Voice commands would also be used for menu navigation.
Analysis
How did it go? What could I do better?
Overall, the project earned a First class level of mark at 75% with plenty of remarks to work on in response. I was very happy with the project overall despite being unable to add the pinball mode, which was turned into a stretch goal as the project moved on. The main response from my tutor was that speech recognition was added effectively as well as providing alternatives to use the system. The system also provided immediate feedback to the player as to whether the input was successful in the game view.
Improvements
Small additions and changes
In response to the feedback, I made some additions and fixes to make the gaming experience run smoother for the player. The first idea came when I was playing the game after and realised there were no sound effects to partner with the movement of the weapons in the game. Basic sound effects were added to support the speech recognition to also provide audible feedback to the player that they had been correctly heard.
The Axebot added in the game also experienced small catching issues when force was applied to create the swinging movement. This was fixed by changing where the force was applied on the gameobject in Unity. A simple fix but a better looking result for the user.
The final large change was made to support uploading to itch.io as the speech recognition system could not be used on the website. A standard button navigation system was added on all UI in the game to support any overall issues that may occur with the Speech modality.
Improved Game
Into the Arena Game
The game is also available in my itch.io page. Due to using the Microsoft Speech recognition system the game is only playable by downloading:
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