Dragonmage X

Dragon wins :(
Fight dragon(s)
Change your build before every fight
Interactive main menu (no conventional buttons)
Orderhall (Dragonmage Headquarters)

Inspiration

Our inspiration has been the scene in Harry Potter and the triwizard tournament, where the participants
are supposed to steal an egg from a dragon in an Arena. The fighting style was mostly inspired by Full
Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, where main protagonist Edward Elric uses gestures (mostly clapping)
instead of Runes to activate various magic like effects.

What it does

Battle
Dragonmage X allows the user to use a gesture to start a magic invocation sequence. During that sequence, the User is able to utter a spell incantation belonging to a spell of a certain element and strength to select and invoke said spell. Once the spell has been recognized, the spell appears on the user's hand and can be launched by a throwing gesture.

Customize Attack Efficacy
Users are able to select and change the elemental alignment of their magic by brewing a potion before each fight to change the strength of their spells, or unlock "ultimate" spells for each element with sufficient alignment. The alignment is balanced between two opposing elements (e.g. Fire and Water etc.). To do so, the user can either brew a potion manually by grabbing ingredients and throwing them into a brew pot, or they can select previously brewed potions as a quick brew option.

How we built it

We built it by going through an iterative development process. The first concept to control an action game with voice commands was quickly proven to be possible by implementing the basic building blocks. After this, more and more features were added as we saw fit for them.

Challenges we ran into

While Action based games usually require split second input, like buttons, we found the gesture detection as an input rather selective when detecting spells. In a high Action setting, like Dragonmage X, the gesture definition has to have a rather wide range of thresholds to also detect somewhat sloppy gestures from the user. Therefore, we had problems defining gestures that would still be considered somewhat intuitive, while also being widely enough spaced apart in the range of motion in order to avoid mistakes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We implemented a "sloppy detection" system in the speech recognition part, allowing us to use smaller and therefore faster models for our speech recognition. This implementation can also be used to fine tune the system slightly to each different user during a potential tutorial phase.

What we learned

Testing in VR with Handtracking was proving to be difficult, so we had to come up with new test strategies. The design for gesture controlled actionscenes was more challenging than we anticipated.

What's next for Dragonmage X

There are mainly two ideas to persue in our opinion:
PVP
Afaik Wizard duels, like in "Harry Potter", but with gestures and possibly in an arena setting. Integration of Spacial Anchoring and Object Detection
In the book "Scholomance" by Naomi Novik monsters invade dorm rooms by different means and need to be exterminated before going to sleep. Our idea is to have different objects in the AR view act as spawners or hiding places of some magical creatures. While we understand this might act as nightmare fuel for some people, we thought about possibly using this idea not to fight monsters, but to possibly find and tame these creatures as battle companions.