Overview
For the midterm project, I’m planning on building an interactive 2-players battle game that requires each player to make certain specific body moves and hand gestures to control the action of his/her character, and the characters of the players in the game will make different moves to attack basing on the specific moves and gestures the players do. The outcome of each move will also be different accordingly. I called this project “Battle Like a Ninjia”.
Background & Inspiration
My idea for this form of interaction between the players and the game is to a large extent inspired by the cartoon “Naruto”. In Naruto, most of the Ninjias need to do a series of hand gestures before they launch their powerful Ninjitsu skills. In most of the existing battle games of Naruto today, players launch the character’s skills simply by pushing different button on joystick. I however want to put more emphasis on all the hand signs these characters do in the animation. Google’s pixel 4 that features with hand-gesture interaction also inspires me.
Motivation
I’ve always found that in most of the games today, the physical interaction between players and games is limited. Even though with the development of VR and physical computing technology, more games like “Beat Saber” and “Just Dance” are coming up, still, the number of video games that can give people the feeling of physical involvement is limited. Thus, I think it will be fun to explore more possibilities of diversifying the ways of the interaction between the game and players by riding of the keyboards and joysticks and having the players to use their body to control a battle game.
How to build it & Potential Technical Problem
Most of the PoseNet library don’t include detailed hand gesture recognition so I think I need another model to recognize those specific hand signs that will trigger the character to use different moves to attack. After research, I did find some projects that also involves hand gestures recognition like this and this. I’m probably going to use them as reference while developing this project. I might still be using PoseNet to detect the body movement of the players. One of the major difficulties I’m anticipating now is that there are two players in the game. I’m not sure if the trained model can tell which hand is which player. I think the coding might get a bit messy…
Ideal Final Output
The ideal result is that the model can successfully recognize the hand gesture and body movement of each player, thus allowing the character to battle accordingly in the game. The characters can use different skills, attack or dodge basing on the input the player gives, their HP will also change accordingly. And finally the game will give a winner.