Here's a team project that went a bit away from the classic mouse and keyboard/controller that I have experienced throughout my work on game development.
This was the final project for one of my university modules at the University of Worcester, which is a volley-ball game programmed in C# using a modified XNA Framework and integrating Kinect controls with the Microsoft SDK.
I can only say that I’m more than happy on how this turned out and I had a lot of fun working on it as well as enjoying to work with relatively new technology and learn something relevant to today’s game industry.
Here’s a video demonstration of how it works, put nicely together by two of my team-mates:
As by the time me and my team-mates started working on this project we already had quite extensive knowledge of what each of us knows best in terms of game programming, we managed to split the workload in parts that would fit each of us and allows us to work simultaneously, without being slowed down in case one of us would lose pace.
My part consisted mostly in dealing with collision detection and response, the ball's physics, loading and displaying the graphics as well as occasionally helping my colleagues if they got stuck.
A fun fact about how we met the project requirements and why we have chosen the pirate theme is to do tightly with collision detection. Yes, it seems that in very odd cases, collision detection can dictate a game's direction. Or at least it did in our case.
We started initially with a plain VoleyBall theme for our game but we couldn't think about anything that would give a nice flavour to it. When we got to the point of creating the net we got slightly stuck at implementing our collision detection with a classic rectangular shaped net. This was caused by the modified XNA framework we were using, which was built to work better with physics simulation and collision between circular shaped objects. Due to this we brainstormed that making the game to be Pirate Volley we could use 3 circular shaped objects on top of each other for the net (the 3 barrels) and also have a whacky theme for our game. This way we managed to easily implement collision between the ball and the barrels which turned out to make the game more interesting that plain volleyball.
We started initially with a plain VoleyBall theme for our game but we couldn't think about anything that would give a nice flavour to it. When we got to the point of creating the net we got slightly stuck at implementing our collision detection with a classic rectangular shaped net. This was caused by the modified XNA framework we were using, which was built to work better with physics simulation and collision between circular shaped objects. Due to this we brainstormed that making the game to be Pirate Volley we could use 3 circular shaped objects on top of each other for the net (the 3 barrels) and also have a whacky theme for our game. This way we managed to easily implement collision between the ball and the barrels which turned out to make the game more interesting that plain volleyball.
If you are interested in seeing the blogs of my team-mates, here's where to find them: