Inspiration
We were originally going to make a game about Percival the plastic bag, drifting around on his way to pollute the ocean, because one of our members was inspired by the drifting motion aspect of the game Flower. Somehow this turned into a smog cloud instead, and a tiny bit of our original environmental themes persisted.
What it does
We implemented a game using the leap-motion as a controller that allows the player to control a cloud traveling through the wrong neighborhood. He just wants to get back to the dump but several entities want to prevent him from doing so. The player must navigate a corridor of these entities, dodging obstacles and large creatures in order to survive until the end.
How we built it
Unity + C# + leap motion + sketchup
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge at first was hooking up the leap motion. We hadn't used it before, so we were new to its methods of finger/hand tracking, which meant a lot of googling during the first section of the project. In addition, there was this weird issue where having a leap motion controller collide with anything would cause unity to crash that really slowed down the testing process.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're actually quite proud of the animations in the game! The best animation is the environmentalist who vacuums. Somehow we had the idea that an environmentalist would want to stop smog with a vacuum cleaner, so that's what we went with.
What we learned
Leap motion is a really cool piece of tech. Its tracking is very solid, and breaks down into many specific hand regions (each finger, palm, large and small hand movements, etc), allowing for a lot of variety and specificity in the control scheme.
What's next for Sammy the Smog Cloud
TBD, but potentially touched upon more for one member's independent study course.
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