Future development
These are a few additional features that I would love to add to this version of the project:
First, an attract mode or video that plays when the title screen has been idle for too long. This would be used to demonstrate game play, and get players interested in playing the game.
Second, I’d love to add a camera to the cabinet and an additional scene that captures a picture of the player who reaches the high score. This solves one of the issues with entering names on a high score screen with just two dials, but isn’t really in the spirit of unimodal interaction.
Third, update some of the features for the cabinet. I would like to continue to experiment with using different dials to see if I can improve upon the ones that I am currently using. Some feedback I have received requested larger dials (though I’ve noticed that the travel length becomes larger linearly with the dial size) and I think there is a happier medium that I can achieve. Adjusting the smoothing, and the threshold in which the shapes change would help make this more responsive as well. And I would also like to recut the marquee with a printed opaque acrylic and replace the EL Wire with additional WS2812B LED strips.
Fourth, additional mechanics for the levels. There are currently hooks in the code for a reversed movement penalty, and the ability to scale shapes. With further development, power ups that could give extra misses, make your shape larger (or smaller), shapes that need to be avoided, and more could be added to the game.
Additionally, I feel as though the general concept is quite strong, and I’ve enjoyed the hours (and hours) of play testing that I’ve done getting this right. I could potentially continue development on the game for other platforms, and envision a version of this game that has different themes for levels with unique mechanics of their own. The themes could also differ visually, and could be journey through the history of human design (from cave painting to ray tracing for example).
Matthew Deline 