Life is a Village
From EQUIS Lab Wiki
Life is a Village is a game paced to bicycle exercising. The game is meant to be accessible to a wide variety of ages and to both genders, and involves no violence. This game represents our first effort in the Computer-Aided Exercise field. We have started implementation: you can read about it here.
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Overview
In the game, players create a village. The village is made up of buildings, roads and gardens, and is populated by people going about their daily lives.
To create a village, players must gather resources that can be used to create structures and other things found in the village. For example, wood is required to build a log cabin; stone is required to build a tower, and so forth.
To help in gathering resources, players may use the help of their villagers. Building certain structures such as shops, houses and farm land help to recruit more villagers to the village.
The game is played from the first person perspective. Players will spend much of their time hunting for resources to use in the construction of the village. Once sufficient resources have been gathered, players are rewarded by being allowed to add another structure to their village.
Basic Gameplay
The game takes place in a large three-dimensional terrain, featuring hills, valleys, mountains and streams. Players navigate the terrain on their bicycle in the obvious way: pedalling moves forward; pedalling quickly moves forward quickly; steering turns the bike. Going uphill makes cycling harder; going downhill makes cycling easier. Force feedback is used to make the ride "bumpier" if the terrain is rough.
The player first explores the landscape to find a location for the village. Choice of location can significantly influence the look of the village - built on the side of a stream, on a hillside, or in a desert plain.
Once the home location is selected, the player starts to look for resources. Resource nodes are indicated by markers in the game world. If the player moves through a resource marker, a villager is dispatched to harvest the resource. Resource nodes appear in logical locations in the game world; for example, wood resource nodes appear next to forests; stone resource nodes appear next to cliffs, and so forth. The player starts with only one villager, so initially only one resource can be harvested. As structures are added to the world, more villagers become available.
Resource nodes are spread over the world, with more advanced nodes being available in places that are harder to reach (high up on steep slopes, or simply far away.)
As the game proceeds over time, the player can add increasingly advanced structures, adding to the beauty and function of their village. The game is not intended to be played at a single session, but over an extended time. Players can save the game between sessions, and later pick up where they left off.
Exercise Benefit
The goal of the game's exercise content is to be adaptable to the player's level, no matter how basic, and to be scalable as the player becomes more fit over time.
The player's initial goal is to find easy resources (wood, stone, etc.), which can be located near to the village's start location and on relatively flat ground. Therefore, the player can obtain initial success with very modest exercise. More fit players will be able to obtain these initial goals more quickly, and move on to more difficult goals.
More advanced resources are found in increasingly difficult locations - either further away from the village, or via terrain that is more difficult to navigate (bumpy, hilly, etc.) As players progress (and become more fit), they will be able to achieve these more difficult goals. In order to keep the game interesting over the long-term, some resources will be available only through very difficult physical acts, such as climbing a mountain.
The key to the design, however, is that even the most unfit player will be able to achieve short-term goals quickly, while more difficult long-term goals are available as the player progresses.
Detailed Design
This section, in progress, provides more detailed design information.
- Implementation
- Development Plan
- Implementation Notes
- Rob's Design Notes (to be integrated with LIAV corpus when the branch becomes stable)
- Game Design
