Game Prototyping – [Unnamed multi touch prototype]

Game gourmets!
It’s time for the second installment in our series of posts about the prototyping work we’ve been doing here at Mediocre. This time we will take a look at a project not quite as refined as the Garbatron prototype. We present to you…

[Unnamed multi touch prototype]

This prototype was a quick experiment in multi touch gameplay. The idea was that the player touched objects on the screen, and held the finger on each object until a timer indicated that the finger should be lifted for the object to be removed. With different sizes of objects requiring a different amount of time to be removed an intriguing gameplay mechanic occured, not entirely unlike playing a musical instrument. Fingers often ended up in intricate interlaced patterns messing with the players ability to correctly identify which specific finger needed to be lifted at specific times.

One of the most obvious problems was that the fingers obscured what was happening on the screen. This was mitigated by the ability to move the fingers away from an object while still keeping that object activated, visualized by a line being drawn from the object to the corresponding finger. While this problem was kind of solved, another one was that the game more or less required the device to be placed on a table (or other appropriate surface) due to the heavy focus on 2+ finger multi touch. And in the end we decided to scrap the idea since it wasn’t that fun.

Below you can see a quick gameplay prototype I whipped up to test the mechanics.

Signing off,
Emil