Eryn’s Status Report for Apr 3

I proposed and implemented two major changes to the game design. Firstly, to improve the accuracy of control signal interpretation, we decide to reduce the previous 3-level controls to 2-level controls, just on and off. Secondly, to accommodate the significant number of false positives, we want to limit the impact of each command. In our previous design, if the user thinks left, the cart will move left immediately, where the action is fully executed upon one single command which could be falsely detected. Now we plan to design something like the peashooter in Plants VS Zombies, in which the user must shoot a sequence of peas to eliminate the zombie. So instead of giving a single command, the user needs to keep thinking “shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot …” and the zombie is only killed after being shot ten times. With that, every command only achieves 10% of the target, therefore reducing the impact of false positives. Also, to avoid users wasting peas when there’s no zombies, we’ll limit the number of available peas, otherwise users could cheat by not switching intentions and keeping shooting throughout the game. The implementation of the change is underway and I’m expecting to see a working prototype next week.