Friday, October 13, 2006
Pac Mouse v0
Pac Mouse v.0
The kids in the game lab have designed a dance pad game based on Pac Man. In this version, Pac "Mouse" eats cheese dots and runs away from the mouse "ghosts". We mocked it up pretty closely to their designs. We saw some inherent problems with the design, but wanted to go ahead and design it so that the challenges could be clearly demonstrated.
As we suspected, our initial thoughts are that it doesn't work. Here's why:
The kids in the game lab have designed a dance pad game based on Pac Man. In this version, Pac "Mouse" eats cheese dots and runs away from the mouse "ghosts". We mocked it up pretty closely to their designs. We saw some inherent problems with the design, but wanted to go ahead and design it so that the challenges could be clearly demonstrated.
As we suspected, our initial thoughts are that it doesn't work. Here's why:
- It takes a good game and makes it worse. Pac Man is easy to navigate... the challenge comes in being faster than the ghosts and the use of the joystick almost becomes invisible to the player. In this version... the challenge is in just doing the stepping... the ghosts are secondary.
- It is difficult to move. It seems that in moving... we want to either mimic the natural walking/running motion... where to move forward you don't "step left step left step left step left" with one foot... or even step and hold... rather, we want to "step left, step right, step left, step right", etc.
