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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.
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.
It's more than just the movement of the fingers: the characters on the screen were essentially animated fingers. So yeah, you can make it modular, but you're going to be changing the finger movement, the graphics, and the way the character on screen moves.....what else is there? You've pretty much changed everything.
All the same, I'm going to guess that the real problem was that the expected return on investment was too low for the amount of development time it was taking. The localization problem was just one more expense on top of that, and they decided it wasn't worth it.
Frankly, unless Microsoft comes out with a killer game for Natal (which I haven't seen yet), I don't think it will be very popular.
Qxe4
I say, do no localization. Most localization, especially for low budget games is -terrible- unless you actually have a studio there. The thing is A) Its a low budget game, if it doesn't sell well in some countries, chances are you lost less than if you hired a good localization expert. B) its downloadable, this means no one is going to really be offended, if its not sold at a retail store, the idiots who censor generally don't even have the console the game is on to try to find "offensive" online games, let alone try to play them. Just look at how many RPGs have been killed with sub-par localization, even if the translation is spot-on, the substitution of jokes, changes to characters and scenes all make for a lousy experience. Translate? Yes. Localize? No.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.
Fun-failure.
Eric Baird
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.