Why I’m making a motion control game in 2016
When I first started developing for the Wii U, it had already been struggling for the couple of years since its release. Nintendo were keen for more games to showcase the console’s GamePad, and being the bright-eye’d naive young developer I was, I arrogantly thought I could step up to that challenge!
After spending a bit of time getting the devkit and tools up and running, I realised the Wii U also supported Wii Remotes as well. I wrote out a list of game concepts for both GamePad and Wii Remotes to prototype when my current project was completed. Well that project fell through, and added to that, I’d got the devkit on a deferred payment scheme. So the clock was ticking to get a game finished and released, and make the cash needed to pay for the kit.
I decided to start with Wii Remotes, and an idea I’d had when first exploring the Wii U’s API’s. Wii Remotes at their most basic level output 3 floats to represent x,y,z rotation, and it seemed like most games simply mapped these real-world movement values one-to-one to movement in the game. Swing a tennis racket or aim a gun. Instead, I mapped those values to colour.
Change the hue, saturation and lightness. That was rapidly boiled down to just controlling hue in one dimension, as otherwise people would get lost in an ocean of grey, unable to work out how each movement corresponded to altering the lightness or saturation.
The simplest game I could make from that was matching colours. Players would be given a target colour, and have to rotate their Wii Remote in order to change their own colour to match. Point one end of the Wii Remote up and it outputs a 1. That translates into one end of the colour spectrum – red. Point the other end up, and you get 0, which translates as blue. Rotate between the two in order to cycle through the whole colour spectrum.
Flight of Light has evolved much since then, but in many ways, it is still the same fundamental game, underneath the many layers of visual abstraction that now separate it from those roots. Along that journey, I’ve been advised many times to change the game’s control scheme. Use discreet lanes, or discreet buttons, like guitar hero. Have the colours snap into solid bands. However, I’m glad I resisted those calls, as the game wouldn’t be where it is today otherwise. It’d be just another clone of the many rhythm games that have come before it.
Equally, having that continuous range of input has opened up paths that otherwise wouldn’t be there. Being able to race in-time to the music is now an integral feature, but may never have come about were it not for the way the game is controlled.
More over, it’s allowed the game to spread to multiple different platforms and control schemes. The game can be played with exotic devices like Kinect and Leap Motion, or more traditional mouse or console controller analogue stick. Or even touchscreens on mobile phones.
Why stick with motion control then, if more conventional controls are available? Firstly, motion feels the most natural to play with. That may be a consequence of having spent more time perfecting the control system with Wii Remotes than anything else, but for the most part, it’s intuitive. It’s a lot more approachable to non-gamers. When I take the game to conventions, people still associate the Wii Remote as something that let them be kinda good at games without needing to invest too much time mastering a complex rule set or sequence of actions to perform.
The downside is that Flight of Light isn’t nearly as kid-friendly as I’d hoped. Anyone below a certain age struggles to play, as the game requires fine motor skills and quick reactions. Little kids have neither.
Secondly, and somewhat related to the first point, I feel quite strongly that motion controlled gaming was never given the chance to fully run its course. It feels like most of the industry treated it like something outside of their comfort zone, and something they were all too happy to drop when the chance came. A lot of people bought Kinects and Wii’s, but how many developers stepped up to the plate to serve that audience?
I’m not pretending Flight of Light is anything revelatory or unique, but at least by experimenting with motion controls, I can say I’ve taken a different path to create something people have enjoyed.
