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Fighting With Your Fingers — A Canceled Indie Game Concept For Natal
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Though Microsoft's Project Natal won't be released until later this year, indie studio Arkedo has already revealed a canceled project for the peripheral. Called 2 Finger Heroes, it was to be a beat 'em up where your fingers do the fighting. 'Characters would be controlled by moving your fingers, while special moves could be done by incorporating your whole hand. The environment could even be affected by moving your arms folded at your chest.' On why it was canceled, one of the developers said, 'One of the design flaws of this, apart from the fact that it demanded some very precise pattern recognition from the Natal system, is that it would have been HELL to localize. Yup, what can be understood as the victory sign in France could be a terrible insult in the UK, for instance. And we are not even talking about Italian. Oh, the possibilities...'"
No wonder it was canceled, it sounds way too much like the title of a movie I could only download from The Pirate Bay after logging in.
Are localizations for downloadable games -really- that important? Usually people who download games from a different region generally know what to expect in the game. I can see localization being an issue for high-budget games, but for low budget indie games, its more or less just another expense. How many of us have played J-RPGs that have been "localized" and made terrible either by censorship or by forcing us to listen to sub-par English voice actors?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So, don't start off with hard-coded pre-defined movements. Develop the movement recognition, rules etc first and the actual finger movements last. Of course this means that the actual movements list will differ for each culture. But what do you expect when you are trying to do something with body gestures? Uniform acceptance of American Anglophone Middle Class Male 18-25 Year Old Computer Enthusiast points of view?
The solution here is pretty obvious. Collect all of the most offensive and rudest gestures known to man and make them the only way to play the game. Not only will it sell the game just by itself, you'll advance the art of obscene gesturing immeasurably, giving it a global sophistication and sensibility the field desperately needs.
Not trying to troll here, but from the article and the dev's forum post it doesn't seem that this game actually got any development time. If a game only gets 12 days of concept work put into it, and no actual game code or art assets, is it really news if it gets "cancelled?" By that definition, any game studio brainstorming ideas for a new game "cancels" multiple projects before settling on one they like.
Isn't Natal's resolution ~4cm? At that resolution, I doubt the system can pick up individual finger movements.
My one-finger hero is surely George Carlin.
Yup, what can be understood as the victory sign in France could be a terrible insult in the UK, for instance
The only problem I see is that French people are insulting.
p0rn seems to be much easier to localize...
Could that be inspiring for Natal "gaming" ? :)
I have a specific set of gestures for whoever is responsible for cancelling this game for that reason. A
Of all the technical challenges of this, they were all that worried about localizing this?
Sounds like an off the cuff remark that has no basis in reality. They had an idea, their project got cancelled. Don't you think you could provide some instructions for what gestures to recognize and people would learn them like 'moves' in a game?
Totally useless summary, information, article, and conclusion. Shouldn't have clicked on any of this.
Long live the BSD license
The French have a sign for victory? I was not aware of this.
Devs: Okay we have this game concept for Natal where you wiggle your fingers around and control the game. Natal claims its that precise so there will be no problem right?
MS: Hahah we say a lot of crazy shit don't we? Now about this game, would it change the mechanics much if instead of wiggling fingers players had to stand in clear view of the camera and wave their arms in exaggerated flailing motions?
Devs: Erm it might
MS: Well maybe the player could sit on the couch and make retarded steering wheel motions.
Devs: Okay...
MS: And you say this is a fighting game? How critical is responsiveness and precision?
Devs: Very, it's a fighting game.
MS: We got you covered. We've got latency down to 250ms. Of players have to make spastic flailing actions which adds to that time but that's not our fault is it? And precision is a very respectable 80%. The other 20% of the time it ignores you or does some other action. Just map 4 or 5 motions onto generic fighting moves and you'll be fine.
Devs: Perhaps we'll forget the whole idea.
MS: Well if you do go ahead, here's a hand sign for you - Gangsta!
The excuse about not finishing it because of globalization seems a bit contrived. It could be easily solved by selecting to play as "the frenchman" or "the italian", and give the players gestures depending on which character they played. Or simply just choose culture-agnostic gestures.
However, it seems like a cool idea to implement a simple thing like a real-time stone, paper, scissors, where you can pretty much attack and defend at any time. Seems like a game likely to boost reaction time and ESP skills.
it's a fine line between "Heroes" and "Herpes".
Especially from a distance.
what can be understood as the victory sign in France...
France has a sign for victory?!
In P2P action, too many players would have resorted to this move a last resort.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.