Team 21 Concept Review

Chicory: A Colorful Tale

Chicory is a game with very tactile controls, painting and swimming through the actual landscape of the world. It also has a generally silly and fun tone, making it a good candidate to interface with a silly controller. 

The core mechanics (and keyboard controls) are:

• Directional movement (Hold WASD keys)
• Painting on the world (Hold left mouse button + mouse movement)
• Jump (Press spacebar)
• Swim (Hold shift key)

Inspired initially by the idea of controlling the game with a paint brush and palette, the painting mechanic is practically begging for motion controls. The other controls are more standard fare for puzzle platforming, where thinking carefully about your interactions with the digital world lends itself well to thinking about your interactions with a controller in the physical world too.

Would it be feasible to successfully control both mouse and character movements with tilt controls in each hand, or would that scheme be overly difficult/frustrating?

Here's the idea that inspired it all! Not pictured on the diagram are LEDs in the brush and palette that light up with the current paint colors, updating based on player input.

Expanding on the idea of drawing, an Etch-a-Sketch is a well known way of combining play and drawing!

The main character of Chicory is this cute little dog, so it maps well into being made into a marketable plushie (controller guts and batteries sold separately).

This concept initially had a maze inside the tilt platform, but was removed for the sake of being less evil.

All the characters in Chicory are named for foods, so this left field theme was inspired by the idea of playing with the characters is like playing with your food!

WEBFISHING

WEBFISHING is a fairly simple fishing-centric game, with a focus on silliness and community interaction. Fishing games are generally a good candidate for alternate controls, as fishing is a real world activity with a number of tangible objects associated.

The core mechanics (and keyboard controls) are:

• Directional movement (Hold WASD keys)
• Cast line (Click left mouse button)
• Reel in line (Hold left mouse button/Spam click left mouse button)
• Open menu (Tab key)
• Move cursor in menu (Mouse movement)
• Select menu items (Click left mouse button)
  

Inspired initially by the obvious idea of a fishing rod controller, we hit a roadblock on realizing we'd need mouse cursor controls for the menus. This quickly resolved itself when we realized tabbing in and out of the menus can also switch the same set of inputs from controlling movement and fishing to controlling the mouse.

How much practical functionality are you willing to sacrifice for absurdity? Which of these designs cross the line?

It wouldn't be a fishing game without a fishing rod controller!

When thinking of fishing objects outside of the pole, my next thought will always go towards a bucket hat. Similar gear can be obtained and worn in the game, so you can match!

While a guitar might first seem out of place for a fishing game, WEBFISHING does in fact have playable guitars in game!

We lovingly call this one "Oops! All Foot Pedals" in a tribute to the absurdism inherent in WEBFISHING.

When we asked ourselves "what would be the most fun thing to retrofit into a controller?", well, the design speaks for itself.