A four player variant of Pacman made when I was at Onkel Estrup. The new twist is that each Pacman is controlled by two players, using a dining table as a controller. My responsibility was design, programming, animation and partake in the concept development.
The game was made so it could be used as a team building exercise at company events. Since you had to be two people controlling one Pacman, you would have to cooperate in order to win the game.
Two sensors in the form of an iPod Touch was mounted to the underside of the tables. The players liftet up the their table from each side. By tilting the table back and forth and from side to side, the players would make their Pacman move up, down and sideways.
The game mechanics are pretty simple and not quite the same as in the original Pacman. You eat pellets as usual, and the bonus fruit has been replaced with bonus Ivar Dyrhaugs (Ivar is a Norwegian celebrity known for a music show he hosts on the TV channel NRK. He is also an employee of the client.). Another difference from the original is that the Pacmans were made so that they exploded when they touched eachother. In order to limit the game so that others could have a go at it, we added a timer that would kill both Pacmans after a certain time. In any case the player with the most points would win.
These seemingly odd mechanics resulted in some frustrating and funny reactions. If you would meet the other player while running around eating pellets and Ivar Dyhaugs, you would react in a few different ways. If you had the lead and was the malevolent type, you would most likely chase the other player to try to kill it and thus keeping the lead. You would most likely try to run away if you didn’t have the lead. This game had the same kind of engagement as the game King of the Hill, where you would try to secure your own success at the cost of other’s.
Technically this was actually quite simple. The iPod Touches were wirelessly connected to an AirPort Express. So was the Mac Mini that hosted the game. An OSC app was running on the iPod’s, transmittng OSC-signals to the Mac Mini. The game, made in Flash, listened to these signals via a socket server. And that’s about it.
This project took me about a month to finish. A lot of the time was spent on testing WiiMotes as input devices -which was a complete waste of time.
Is that OSC, as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control? What was actually displayed on the iPods’ displays; simple arrows, a scaled down version of the game?
Looks sazzy. Did you do the graphics yourself, or did you have help from a graphics designer?
Hi Carl-Erik.
Yes, that OSC as in Open Sound Control. I used one of the OSC apps you can get at the AppStore. They all work mostly the same. It was only the OSC app that was visible on the iPods. They were both put in each Pelicase (http://www.pelishop.no/) and mounted to the underside of each dining table, so the players never saw the iPods. They didn’t even know they existed. It was the Mac Mini that showed the game on a big-screen.
Yes, I did all the graphics myself. Actually I did everything. I had a lot of fun with this project! I tried using Wiimotes before landing on iPods, but the software for listening for Wiimote input was very unstable at that time. Besides, OSC was much simpler to work with.
I guess I could have written a more detailed report on this project.
I remember I created my own game engine for this. It worked quite similar to Flixel and the likes. The main difference was that I animated all the entites using Flash’s animation tools and timeline. The game engine read all frames from all entities and rendered them out via blitting.