Multi-touch: Final Presentation

Original Goal for the Application

The original goal for the application was to have a realistic bow and arrow that will shoot at a moving target.

Related Work

This application is a pretty straightforward game where a user has a ship that will shoot at a target out in space. There are several classic space shooter type games and some more modern games that are similar.

There is one game called “Gridwars” that is an interesting game. It has moving targets moving around a grid and when the bomb button is pressed, the grid moves in 3D destroying nearby objects.

There is a multi-touch “space wars” game where users are shooting things at each other (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2NIZV8xqnY). There is a galaxy spinning in the background.

Lessons Learned During Project Implementation

It is time-consuming to get a project working appropriately with MS Visual Studio and C# for the MS Surface. This is the first time I worked with MS languages and tools, but it was similar to Java. Still, I mostly work with web programming languages and this is different.

It is time-consuming to get objects to appear to look like they are getting shot in 3D into a wormhole or black hole type structure. This version of the game is just making the shooting bullets move (kind of) towards the center and shrinking as they are moving away from the ship that is shooting them. It is extremely generic, but it would be a difficult task to implement the actual physics that I was looking for. This gives the general idea, however.

A good simple solution that would solve the problem of shooting missiles into a wormhole and look realistic would be to make a grid of missile sizes and directions that would map to the coordinates of the screen. Then, each update of the screen, the missiles would move and adjust size and that would make it more realistic. I’m sure there is also some algorithmic formula to move the missiles according to the physics of a wormhole.

Application Designed for the Surface

The application that I designed for the Surface is a simple two player game where the user controls their ship by moving it back and forth. The ship will automatically shoot bullets into a wormhole at a moving target. I tried to make it look like the bullets were falling into the wormhole and the target was moving around the wormhole.

The object of the game is for the two players to hit the target as many times as possible in a chosen time frame. There is a high score board so that the players can try to beat their past scores.