Graveyard Escape

Info

As part of improving my skills in wearable technologies, I have decided to create a game with a narrative and this narrative generates around a theme so we have started looking for theme and for that we got our professor’s recommendation of creating a game with the theme of “Spooky”. This is project was a collaboration between 4 people and we have started making a mind map over what generates the feeling of spookiness in the human mind. We found a lot of theme but we one of the common theme that was emerging from the mind map was generation around graveyard. We have started generating story from the graveyard where also your choices along the game effects upon your narrative. (In a small way)

The narrative

The story of the game goes something like this, the protagonist of the game finds himself in the graveyard with no memory at all. He starts to explore and try to remember how we ended up in the graveyard and upon exploring he remembers that he was inside the graveyard because love of his life passed away and he came to his grave to remember and cherish the memories of her. Upon moving in the graveyard he faces a black cat which curses him and convert him in the cat. Now the protagonist has to pass different obstacles in the cat form. After passing this obstacles the protagonist faces a crow and upon encountering the crow he is converted into a crow and protagonist has to pass the obstacles given by the crow. These will lead him to the main demon where he has power of both crow and cat and it’s upto the protagonist to decide which power to use when to complete the final obstacles from the demon. After completing all 3 challenges he is presented with 2 options upon whom to trust between cat and crow through out the encounters and presented to choose whom to trust. If the player chooses the correct one then he can meet one last time with his love. He chooses the wrong one he is forever stuck in the graveyard. The dialogues from cat and crow are constantly interchanging so the choice from the player is always a different.

The wearables

For this we were super excited in creating something different so we have created a add on sleeve for the players which has one side of the arm as a cat and another side of the arm as a crow. We got black fur for creation of the cat side. We also had a glove which we have moulded as a cat paw. Our electronics were hidden under the pow area and under the elbow. The controller was hidden at the back of the neck where both cat side and crow side were controlled by the same controller to reduce the complexity of the wearable. The interesting side was of the crow side where we have feathers which we cut out from a special black shiny fabric and glued them over the black sleeve of the arm. We had multiple accelerometer attached inside the sleeve at arm, shoulder and wrist in order to identify the movements of the arm.

The game

Game was one of the most simple yet complicated part as we had to incorporate the wearables that we have created with the whole game. We had 3 stages in the game. First stage is which you play as a cat and it’s a simple platformer game where you can move left and right by simply touching your shoulders, also if you want to jump you can make a fist in the paw also if you want to kill your enemies you can make a gesture of scratching with your paw and the cat will scratch and kill the enemies in the proximity. The second level was the crow mode, which was again a simple flappy bird type of endless runner game but that game is controller by the crow side of the arm so you have to flap that arm fast enough so that you can levitate in the air. If you slow your arm movements the crow will crash and you will lose the game. The last level of the game is the combination of both cat and crow games where player has to decide on which part they will use cat powers and on which part they will use crow powers, the choice effects a lot on the level progression as wrong choice mostly kills you in the game (Except 2-3 starting place where the level is forgiving about your choice).

Collaborators

Olivia Cueva, Rhodney, White

Technology used

Wearables, Unity, C#, Narrative