Endless Skiier: Final

Endless Skier
Made by Kellie Knight, Kevin Vylet, and Quin Rogers

Concept:
Endless Skier is an alternate controller game where you use physical "ski-shoes" to control the movement of your skiing avatar. Shift your weight from left to right to avoid logs, trees, rocks, and snowmen that are dropped by your player 2 competitor!

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Rules, Goals, Mechanics

Endless Skier is a take on traditional endless runner games, but with a physical component involved:  players have to shift their weight left and right on physical "ski-shoes" in order to control the horizontal movement of the character on the screen. The ski shoes have piezo sensors that detect the weight of the player, and respond accordingly. We also added a second player who is able to use keyboard controls to spawn snowmen at the top of the screen, adding a competitive element.

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Creation Process

We initially wanted to create a game where you step back and forth, and the faster your steps are, the faster the character runs in a horizontal direction. We created our shoes, which consisted of two pairs of flip flops with small piezo sensors "sandwiched" between each shoe. Through testing, we realized that the Piezo sensors were less finicky when leaning left and right, rather than continuous stepping. This is when we decided to make it a skier instead of a runner.

We then switched from horizontal movement to vertical movement, which gave a point of view that feels more immersive to the player standing in front of the screen. We also made pixel graphics that fit the theme of our game. During our second round of testing, the piezo sensors were still a bit unreliable, and one of them broke. We opted to switch to bigger piezo sensors, and soldered on longer wires to reduce risk of disconnecting/stepping on wires.

During the last iteration we managed to add a two-player two component which allows a second player to spawn snowmen and try to make the skier lose. We initially wanted to create a separate controller, but due to time constraints we stuck to just keyboard input. It worked out very well.

Everyone who played our game gave positive feedback and had a lot of fun. The controls were very intuitive and people got a hang of them really easily. We may have to adjust the speed because it was a little difficult, but it didn't detract too much from the experience. All in all, I think the game turned out to be a success.

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Trailer

Endless Skier Round 1

On Thursday, my team and I presented our first rendition of our endless skier game! We were able to amp up our ski shoes by putting in some bigger, more robust Piezo sensors. Also, after learning how to solder on Tuesday (which made me feel like a super legit engineer), I was able to attach longer cables so that the risk of accidentally disconnecting/stepping on cables was less of an issue.

I also spent a good amount of time making sprites for the game, since the circles and squares in front of the blue background from the last version were pretty dull. I found an extremely nifty site called Piskel which is basically a free online sprite editor that allows you to easily make sprites and animations. It's a really great tool and I'm definitely going to keep it in mind for future game projects.

I made rocks, trees, logs, and snowmen to use as the objects that the player has to dodge. I also was able to make a tiled border of trees that seamlessly scrolls vertically, simulating the appearance of moving through a forest. Our player character is all cute and bundled up in a pink pompom hat, puffy green jacket, and indigo scarf.. If we have time it'd be cool to be able to choose your character and have different options for player appearance.

Quin put all the assets in, Kevin put the new sensors into the shoes, and then there was a lot of calibrating to do after that. The new sensors, although an improvement, are still pretty finicky, and didn't allow for too much fine control. Not sure if there's much we can adjust unless we use different types of sensors. But it's probably worth messing around with more.

Prof doing some hardcore skiing

The showcase on Thursday was a lot of fun. It was great to see everyone's projects coming along, and there were a lot of impressive ones Unfortunately I was really bad at documentation that day (oops) so I only managed to get one picture of our professor playing the game but you can barely see anything.

Playtesting went well; the sensors were still a little finicky, and the hitboxes are pretty unforgiving, so we'll have to adjust that for the next iteration. We may also add a feature that allows a second player to manually place the objects that the skier has to dodge, giving the game a more exciting competitive aspect. I think this will greatly improve audience participation as well. I'm definitely excited to see how our final result turns out.