Telekinect

2011 - 2012 DeVry GSP Senior Project

I was part of an eight member senior project team at the DeVry Austin campus that developed this game prototype for PC. It was made with the Unity3D game engine, utilizes the Kinect for a “natural feeling” user interface and even features multiplayer (TCP/IP play with two computers / Kinects). In addition to the development, I also wrote the prologue, made the trailer video, and set up the project wiki on our game dev club website.

Telekinect is a third-person action-adventure prototype where you play the role of a telekinetic being that is trying to escape an elemental mind prison. The player uses their body to control the character’s navigation, telekinesis, and throwing of elemental utility orbs.

Notable Contributions

• Spawn points
• “Fan challenge” (gameplay)
• Enemy behaviors
• Jumping mechanic
• Worked on shadow mapping which occupied most of my time and effort. Unity Basic didn’t include the Render Texture feature at the time, so a teammate and I figured out how to bypass the limitation by using OpenGL’s Framebuffer Object mechanism via C++ DLL.

Escape captivity by defeating waves of elemental enemies and completing physics-/element-based challenges. As you progress, pieces of your past surface, revealing the twisted plot that has led to the war between your people, the Movers, and the previously peaceful opposites, the Elementalists.

A common complaint about Kinect games is that they are “on-rails,” meaning that the player is stuck walking pre-determined paths instead of being able to freely explore the game world or move around a battlefield.