Scaffolding: Concept Review (Team 15)

Matthew Cabrera and Isaiah Maeztu

Both Matthew and I had gone through a bunch of different game ideas that could make for novel control schemes, but we ended up landing on Rhythm Heaven (Likely through Heaven Studio or Dolphin Emulation for Rhythm Heaven Fever) or Plants vs. Zombies (Likely through the Steam Release).

All of our controllers were themed after specific minigames within Rhythm Heaven Fever, since most minigames use comparable control schemes. All of them use mimic the basic actions of their respective minigame for their inputs in-game (either A or A + B at the same time). Likely the most fleshed out of these ideas is the Tambourine for use with the minigame of the same name. Here, hitting the Tambourine uses the playground's microphone to detect a button press, with the orientation of the tambourine determining which input is pressed. A dial is also included on the side for the sake of navigating menus, the direction being used determined by both the dial's value and the tambourine's orientation.

For Plants vs. Zombies, all of the controllers are themed around some part of the gardening experience, using the motion to replicate some part of the game. All of them use motion in some way to navigate around the game's playing board, which would likely take the most effort during programming to ensure a cleaner game experience. A huge part of that challenge would be finding a way to legitimately collect Sun, the game's main currency during gameplay. Console versions provide grid-based scrolling for controller cursors and simply pass the player any sun sitting in those grid squares, but the PC versions feature no such leeway.

So I guess for our two questions:

- What would be a good solution for our Sun collecting problem? Should we perhaps target to a specific minigame?

- Do you think that a rhythm game, considering latency, is suitable for a controller like this? And if so, is there potentially a more responsive or accurate method to accomplish this than the microphone solution proposed?

Thank you very much!