Storyboard

 

In order to illustrate how the game proceedes from start to finish I decided to make a storyboard. The different instances presented below are intended to capture the game setup, the goal of the game, and game play techniques.

 

The first sketch shows the setup of the game. Ideally the two players will be positioned opposite each other and their monitors will be placed back to back. This will provide a direct mapping between their physical spatial relationship and their position in the virtual environment; when their bodies are physically aligned, their virtual representations will also be aligned. However, in this sketch I present them side-by-side in order to better illustrate the relationship between their physical posture and the how it affects their opponents view. Thus, the avatar (I will use this metaphor here to refer to the representation of one of the player's in the other one's world) of the left player with the hands stretched provides a wider window in his world than does the right player with his hands relaxed.

This is a top-down view of one of the player's environment. It contains various bonuses distributed around the environment ('B' symbol). The player is depicted in the middle of the world ('P' symbol) and the two lines extending from his icon illustrate the view of his opponent through the window that his body's shape projects to his opponent's environment. The goal of the game is for each player to collect first all the bonus items from his opponent's world, through a process I call looting which is explained below.

In order to collect the bonus points you have to freeze your opponent and you can do that by throwing ice balls against his avatar. You can do this by aligning your body with his (that is why physical alignment might be helpful) and shoot a ball. Shooting an ice ball involves fully stretching your hands and kicking with your right leg; the stretching will make your window larger in your opponent's world, while kicking will prevent you from moving, thus increasing the chances that you might get hit. This technique was invented in order to prevent players from shooting while moving and preventing them from keeping their hands down at all times, consequently making the game more energetic and -I hope- fun.

 

In order to have a clear understanding of your size in the world you occupy, placeholders will be drawn on screen and move/resize according to the player's movement/posture.

The player can avoid enemy fire by either moving left and right, or by ducking. The ball will seem like being darted through your opponent's window (not depicted here).

When hitting your opponent's avatar his window will freeze and zoom in a little, providing a larger view through his virtual world (see next sketch).

At this point you can control the camera view in your opponent's virtual world by peeping through the window. You can do this by rotating your body left or right, as you would normally do when actually looking through a window.

You can get the bonuses which are within your view, a process I call looting, by aligning the camera view with the bonus (bringing it in the middle of the window) and doing the kicking move again. At this point you do not have to have your hands wide open. On the top right of your screen a top-down view of the whole environment of your opponent will be displayed, displaying the position of the bonuses (this maybe be omitted if it makes the game too easy). You can loot as many items as you can before your opponent unfreezes.

The frozen player has the option to speed up the unfreezing process by doing a repetitive motion, like moving his hands up and down (like flying), as if he was trying to warm himself up and melt the ice!

The game finishes when one of the players collects all bonuses from his opponent's virtual world. I may include an on-counter of the bonus items collected and the ones remaining, to give each player a visual guide of their goal. I believe this is going to be a really fun and addictive game!