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Kinect is great piece of hardware, I have no doubt intelligent designer can develop deep and rewarding experience for it. But on thing bother me a lot: Navigating in space. One downside from game that try to shoehorn classic gameplay in kinect is moving the player in space, I don't know how much is fun or not, it look dumb when you have a seemingly free roaming environment and you are reduce to confuse rail targeting. I can totally envision a great JRPG with dynamic battle in a dragon quest style presentation, most aspect of Jrpg are not that based on positioning, I can see kinect adding to a DQ style combat and dialogue a lot, adding gesture and stance (or even facial emotion, frown for persuasion, smile for seduction!) to the gameplay vocabulary naturally.

But moving, navigating and positioning still don't have some cool abstraction. Can you think of a way to do that without the actual awkward system? Or would you solve this?

wait until mankind unlocks the force field technololgy and you naysayers will stop dissing  kinect
it will be aweseom

I'm not dissing :P it's a genuine question about interface. The fact is that my programmer had set up a kinect and interfacing it with unity, I want to mess a bit with some idea!

Btw the only way I see it not too awkward is point and click interface and modal sub gameplay, basically map in top view with point and click and dialog + battle interaction usual first person kinect fare.

force fields solve all problems.

A freely rotating conveyor belt which costs 2999$ so players can actually walk around :)

This is one of the key issues I have with Kinect. It's all well and good flailing your arms but it's very difficult to come up with a physical movement for walking around that people can do without it becoming awkward.

Personally I think that movement with Kinect is going to be largely stuck on rails or done through menus, which is a shame really as free exploration is a lot of fun. My view of how to at least give more freedom is to have the player able to pick which rails to move along like in Killer7. Hand gestures or pointing could indicate the path to follow and then perhaps the player strikes some sort of advancing pose such as leaning forwards with one foot in front of the other or something. This would at least give the player more involvement in the act of navigating game levels.

Or perhaps make free movement somewhat more abstract, as in the player has to drive a vehicle in order navigate open landscapes and all interior activity is carried out in a point and click / menu driven style or simply is switches to some other kind of gameplay. It's probably easier to have players manage driving a vehicle with just your arms than try and walk around using them.

That's a good idea, vehcile is a better and natural metaphore for kinect's "immobility movement"

Use a proper controller. Problem solved.

There is no challenge, the challenge is to get as close as possible to something natural :P

so the challenge is to make motion controls feel like button controls?  :giggle:

No to make it have a leap

Seriously neither button, mice or stick got the convention we use today appear day night.

Click and play was for many year the bastard child of text interface, reducing choice (premade word list limited by graphic display, no syntax), then the contextual click was invented and was use to move, act and scroll screen, which now power complex games like star craft too in a way stick and pad can't. You can't JUST say something new is bad if and just sit down baby ducking.

The light in this challenge might new awesome kind of play which would not be possible before.