Maze Ball - Hooking into the Leap Motion

Some time before Christmas I received an early present from the nice folks at Leap Motion. They added me to their list of beta developers and shipped me an early version of their device.

Since then I’ve been dilly dallying around and I’ve finally gotten something up and running. I call it Maze Ball, and I’d like to post about it every so often here.

Right now the plan is to spend some of my spare time developing this game and then offer it to my employer. If they want to monetize on it then great but if not I’ll release it for free and possibly even open source if everything goes well. That’s all political though so for now let’s just enjoy the tech.

Woo tech!

So here’s what I’m up to and some of my thoughts.

Last night I got it integrated with Gameplay the 3D game engine being developed by RIM. I’ve written about this game engine before. Those who know me would testify that I both think highly of this engine and think it’s a horrifically bad idea for a business to use it for commercial 2D games. That’s really all my opinion boils down to. Since I’m not really interested in platform stability as much as I am cool things to play with, this engine fit the bill!

Without re-writing the design document here’s a down low on what maze ball is. It’s a game where you have a maze and you are a ball. You push your character along the maze and eventually when you get to a hole in the maze you can push yourself through it. The board flips around and now you’re on the other side of the maze. The object of the game is to play a game of capture the flag with another little ball in the maze.

So far I have a mac and windows build running with version 0.7.3 of the SDK. There’s a spinning cube and you can make it translate all over the place using the leap. Right now it’s not moving to the position of your finger but rather it’s moving BY the position of your finger using only translation. 

Just at about that point I decided to watch Adventure Time with Kaylee. So things de-railed.

More on Maze Ball later. Stay tuned kiddies.

Maze Ball Alpha 0.0.0.1

download: win32, Source Code

Requires: OpenAL, Leap version  0.7.3