Final Team 16: Controller Concept Review

By Final Team 16: Jordan Norton & Briah Bellamy

For our concept review, we decided between the games "A Short Hike" and "Echolocaution".

A Short Hike

https://ashorthike.com/

    A Short Hike is a 3D platformer where the player controls a bird named Claire as she tries to get to the top of Hawk Peak so she can have enough cell service to call her mother. The player jumps, flies, glides, runs, and uses tools to ascend the mountain. Along the way they meet characters and explore fun, twisty forest environments.

    This game is relatively simple and fits our needs well. The only controls are arrow keys (movement), Z (jump/fly/glide), X (use item/interact), and ESC (menu/inventory). This will make the attempt at creating a compelling alternate controller moderately challenging but it is absolutely within the scope of this project.

    

Echolocaution

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1545250/ECHOLOCAUTION/

    ECHOLOCAUTION is a cute, casual action game where players must fly through the night sky as a bat hunting for food. Players can select from a cast of unique bats with specific attributes, but all bats have the ability to dash through the sky to avoid predators and use echolocation, which aids bats with finding food and scoring points. This game also has a variety of "treasures" found throughout the game by the bats, so we thought it'd be a cute idea to also theme many of the controllers around holding/using larger objects to recognize the scale of the bats compared to mundane objects in the human world.

    The motivation involves wanting to utilize a sound control system in which players can use their voice to complete audio-centric tasks, as such games that use them aren't very common. We originally wanted to do a controller that used light input to affect game environments similarly to how some games do so with in-game light input, and that also opened the door for sound-based games that do the same.