XpressO

Overview

XpressO is a short narrative and mechanics-driven single-player PC game that incorporates alternative controllers. Iterated on multiple rapid-prototypes and playtests, we presented our game in the ETC Festival in December, 2023 and received positive feedback from the audience.

In this game, the player plays as Igor, the assistant of Dr. Frankenstein, and needs to steal body parts from the cemetery for Dr. Frankenstein and assemble them together to create a new creature.

Project Type	Semester-long Group Project
Platform	PC + Alternative Controller
Engine	Unity
Primary Role(s)	Game Designer/Producer

Video Trailer

Responsibilities

• Designed main game mechanism incorporating alternative controller – touch frame.
• Designed layout and physical interactions for touch frame’s gameplay area.
• Managed project production and communication among clients and team members.

Touch Frame

Initially, touch frame was supposed to be used for the Body Assembly gameplay part in our game. However, due to its high sensitivity, we found it was unable to detect large objects within the frame and calculate distance between large objects.

Based on our test result and features of touch frame, we decided to implement it into our Navigation and Stealing Body Parts gameplay because:

1. It is accurate to detect the location of small objects like wood peg man, which would be great to serve as a navigation controller.
2. We could bring back our initial idea of bringing the action of digging real sand into our game as the frame could detect the movement of the shovel.

Initial Prototype

We put touch frame on a piece of paper that was drawn with important locations in our game. Once calibrated, the performance of navigation of our character was satisfactory. However, we found some problems in this prototype:

1. Real decorations in the frame such as graves would be detected as they passed through the infrared of the frame.
2. Players found it difficult to carry out the digging action and obtain body parts by lifting the wood peg man up and down at a certain location of a grave.

Iterated Prototype

Based on our test result, we decided to lift the touch frame that would keep all the decorations below the scan of the infrared, while the wood peg man that the player uses for navigation was taller that could be detected. Also, we divided the layout within the frame to be two sections: one for character navigation and the other for digging action. The player could dig small gravels and had a real experience of “digging up a body”.

Though there were challenges during the development of our game, I have learned many lessons from designing both game mechanics and alternative controllers.

Gallery