Controller Design

Line Wobbler

So, we continue through the pre-production and production phases of this capstone project. Thus far, Disco is Dead: Slappy Seconds has been envisioned and designed to the point where it can begin development. My directorial roles in the project are 1) Producer and 2) UI Designer for visual and physical interfaces (not auditory). The main focus of this project is to maintain the essence of play through slapping. Initially, we believed it would be safe to stick to traditional input devices (mainly keyboard and mouse, and an Xbox controller). Later though it became evident that, especially with its arcade roots to Disco is Dead!, it needed a more playful doo-dad for players to play with.

Guitar Hero

The first issues that arose with this direction were that the game would no longer be a commercially friendly game; if the game were to be played by anyone, anywhere using their computer (publicly published after graduation, of course), they wouldn’t have this unique controller with them to play it. Games like Guitar Hero and Rockband (and I’d like to note DDR as a personal favourite) all had very successful controller designs that actually acted as the symbols for their games. Another point was the construction of this device. What would it be made from? How can we make it work the way we want it to? None of us are well versed in controller construction, or wiring, or sensors. Of course though, the positives outweighed the negatives and so this is our current solution.

The team came to the conclusion to have a diverse game that could be played on all proposed input types: the keyboard, an Xbox controller and our soon-to-be custom controller. This was proposed as a response to the overall interest of the team to showcase the game at Level UP! As well as provide the opportunity for us to publish on a website for public presence.

Naturally, the inspiration for the controller is based on a head or face that the player gets to slap. There is nothing more satisfying than slapping something AS HARD AS YOU LIKE (like a smooth face) that makes a loud and satisfying sound. It is important that the interaction method feels natural like the action of slapping, therefore the distinct contact points on the slapping controller must coincide with these actions. The currently proposed controller design divides the head into top and bottom parts, left and right sides separated into upper and lower regions, and a central area that prepares the player to punch the controller square in the face.

Angry German Kid

This design, however, needs to be mapped to a keyboard and controller. The experience will not be the same and the player won’t be slapping in multiple directions, instead the player will slap the keyboard downwards while they’ll use the controller as they typically have (thus far this is the direction of thought). The question was then: How do we give players the best experience on these other input devices? How do we replicate this slapping experience? One way this was approached was through the behaviour people exhibit when they don’t know what to press and just press everything at once out of confusion or even frustration. Slapping also requires a greater surface area of the hand to contact something. Therefore, involving multiple keys or buttons per action would theoretically produce a similar result, especially if these keys were not situated in a memorable sequence.

Another question was: how do we build this thing? How can we make it work? Firstly, we need a base that provides the basic function that we need. The Makey Makey is the proposed controller base that provides the function, it is then up to the team to come up with the design for the actual controller interface. That’s mostly my job. The above illustration visualizes most of my thought process. The controller will have clamps that stabilize the whole controller to the edge of a table. The slapping head will have to be a durable enough material to take quite a beating. The head must not be too stiffly connected to the clamped base, so it will be connected to the base by a strong spring. The challenge with this was to create a design that could be universal to most setups and would not demand that the device damage anything it is attached to. Thankfully these materials can be found at Home Depot. Still, the design needs to be viewed from the player’s perspective. The slappable head will be in between themselves and the computer screen and so it cannot obstruct their view. Knowing this, the controller needs to be at a low enough level to be comfortable for the player to slap while providing them with a view of their screen. As I think about this, my ideas change. I’ll get back to you next time with more developments.