Commonality debriefing

Hi, I had a lot of fun with this week's theme! After completing the interactive theme reveal, the immediate thing that came to mind (I think Luca said this as well) was tug of war. For my major studio class last semester, I was doing a lot of experiments with computer mice, which ended with me having a huge stockpile of mice and not many projects with them due to the strike. Thinking of tug of war reminded me of a game idea a friend suggested to me, which was basically "tug of war" with a shared mouse cursor. This is surprisingly easy to implement, because when you plug multiple mice into the same computer, they already share the cursor! The task, then, was to make it more than just "tire my arm out by yanking the mouse over and over again", and to add replayability to the idea. 

My first plan of action was to have some central character that gets pulled in either the left or right direction. I thought the gamefeel of pulling left or right with some springs to make it look really tight could accurately feel like tug of war.  I used some spring joints attached to a central body with invisible spheres on the left and right side, and when you tugged the mouse, it would apply a force to the invisible spheres, causing the whole body to bounce in that direction. It was ok, but i felt that too much was up to the janky physics and didnt feel like actual cursor tug of war (i'm not sure if that's what I should be chasing still?). I then tried to use this plugin that changed the cursor speed at the OS level, because I didn't feel like implementing my own cursor, until that didn't get as slow as I wanted. I then realized that I didn't need to implement my own cursor, and i can simply use the 'moveposition' function for rigidbodies. I then added another dimension to the game so players would have more to focus on (would that make it more replayable? who knows). 

For the aesthetic, I mostly reused assets I've made for different projects. The background was a video I made awhile ago using video synthesis. My main aesthetic reference was the Tetris TGM series games, which have lovely funky low-res backgrounds. 

Next time, I definitely need to start earlier, especially with the debrief, I'd like to be a bit more contemplative. This is my third or so time doing a 'game-a-week' sort of thing, but I can never ever be on time, lol.