Blitz Games: Kinect one-to-one control "isn't cool"

One-to-one Kinect control may offer gratifying feedback, but it isn’t sufficient to make players feel truly connected to onscreen characters, according to Blitz Games’ Nick Adams.
Delivering a talk titled ‘Designing for a Radical Control Method’ atBradford Animation Festival 2011 this week, the design manager drew on challenges faced by the studio during development of the Xbox 360 version of Puss In Boots, a game based on the upcoming Dreamworks film.
“We had to make the player feel connected, we had to make the player feel like a hero,” he explained. “This is where we came up against a problem, because Puss in Boots is Zorro in cat-form: he’s dynamic, he’s got flair and every one of his poses has been lovingly crafted by Dreamworks animators, so he always looks awesome.
“Most players don’t exhibit that same degree of flair.”
Despite a potential lack of elegance, however, players usually believe their performance to be significantly more polished than observers might – a hurdle Adams described as "egocentric bias". To illustrate his point, he referenced YouTube phenomenon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPj6viIBmU.
“I can’t speak for this guy – I’ve never met him and I don’t know what was going on in his head, but he probably thought he looked quite cool,” he told attendees.
“Other people didn’t see him in the same way.”
When Blitz initially added Kinect to the game, it used a system called avateering, which maps the exact skeletal movements of the player directly onto the character.
“We really wanted to create this one-to-one bond with the character, but after trying it, it didn’t really work, and it didn’t look cool,” he admitted. “So somehow we had to go beyond one-to-one, but we had to do it in such a way that we didn’t break the bond.”
The initial solution was a system Blitz Games dubbed ‘semi-teering’, which is based on gesture-driven animations. Instead of mirroring players' movements, the game instead recognises gestures then plays one of a number of pre-canned animations.
“Rather than make the player look worse, we were making them look better – taking what they were doing and exaggerating it,” said Adams.
But semi-teering threw up its own problems: “We were reading the gesture, and then when it finished we’d play the animation,” Adams continued. “But you end up with lag. It looked good, but it just didn’t feel right – you were in this uncanny valley of animation. Sword fighting is such a fast dynamic action that any lag is going to feel horrible.”
The final piece in the puzzle was pre-emptive gesture recognition, wherein the game makes an educated guess at what the player is going to do and prepares an animation early. Halfway through the player’s movement, the full animation, which is usually between two and four frames long, is triggered which in turn leads to a more satisfying experience for the player, with apparently-realtime feedback.
“This was probably our greatest success in the game,” said Adams. “It’s the core mechanic that people are going to judge it on.”

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