This week we made major progress in building the foundation for our exercise game both functionally and aesthetically.
TLDR
City aesthetic
Procedural generation of new city blocks
Volumetric fog to help immerse the player
Activity Block Template
A modular system to easily combine individual activities together
Squat activity
Car dodging activity
Collectible rewards (coins, power-ups)
Point System
Successfully completing activities rewards players with points
Completing multiple activities in a row initiates a combo multiplier
UI Elements
Score
Menu
Game Structure
After looking at other similar exercise games, there were a few things that we noticed and wanted to incorporate into our game in order to enhance user experience. A feature we found missing from many games was the ability to allow the user to customize their experience for specific workouts. There is a line we have to draw between creating a customizable fitness game and creating a fun and immersive game that also provides fitness aspects. The other thing we have to consider is whether we should provide pre-loaded “experiences” through levels or allow users to play through an infinite scroller that keeps generating random obstacles. Our goal with this game is to create a hopefully good combination of both and allow the user to decide.
City Aesthetic Progress
We are procedurally generating our city. We plan on adding more variations of blocks and more buildings to make it look more natural.
Activity Progress
In order to facilitate our game structure, we have created a block system that can easily create new groups of obstacles. We have begun our process of creating these blocks and have done so with a squat activity, sideways dodging activity, and collectible coins to incentivize movement from our players.
Squat Activity
This activity is a combination of three individual squat blocks that move towards the player and indicate that they should squat underneath to avoid hitting them. Successfully avoiding the obstacle generates points for the user, but colliding with the block takes away points from the user.
Car Dodging Activity
The premise for this activity is similar to the squat activity, where the objective of the player is to avoid the oncoming obstacles. Here the player needs to move in physical space from side to side to dodge the cars. The points for this activity also work the same way as the points for the squatting activity.
Coins
In activities like the squat activity, we want to control the player’s movement a little in order to incentivize them to stand up between individual blocks. Our solution for this was to add coins that will provide an increase in score if collected, which should make the player want to move to collect them.
Point System
Completing activities rewards the player by giving them a predetermined amount of points. Currently, we have each individual squat block and car successfully dodged giving the player 10 points each. We also have the player collect coins which reward them with 20 points.
We also plan on implementing a multiplier where completing multiple activities in a row will increase the multiplier so that the next successful activities give a number of points that is multiplied by this multiplier.
UI Elements
Score Tracker
We need a way for the player to keep track of the score as they accumulate points. As shown in the videos below, the score will be displayed on the player’s hand and will update accordingly with point collection.
Menu
We want the player to be able to customize their experience and do things like select predefined workouts, change the difficulty, change the length, and change the speed. These features need to be consolidated into a straightforward menu system for the player, which we have begun to implement and the early stages can be seen in the video below.
Next Up
There are a few things queued up to continue our development:
Missed objective screen
We want to indicate to the player when they have failed/missed a task by flashing their screen red and potentially including a camera shake
New Activities
We want to integrate our “target hitting” activity shown in the second video below as an activity block that we can generate in the scrolling part of our game, and we want this integration to be as seamless as possible
Stay tuned to see more of our ideas!
Videos
Testing for ball throwing activity