Fast Iron Preview – Massively Fun’s one-of-a-kind game for Leap Motion

Fast Iron Preview – Massively Fun’s one-of-a-kind game for Leap Motion | Massively Fun Fast Iron Preview – Massively Fun’s one-of-a-kind game for Leap Motion Fast Iron Preview – Massively Fun’s one-of-a-kind game for Leap Motion June 28th, 2013 Fast Iron is a game designed for use with the revolutionary Leap Motion Controller . It’s new, it’s fresh and, it’s something that has never been seen before. Most of all, it’s a lot of fun to play. We wanted to share some thoughts about our experience building this game and give a peak inside the fun. Make sure to get signed up for the Fast Iron beta at: beta.fastirongame.com and support Fast Iron’s social pages on Twitter and Facebook , before you go! Describing Fast Iron. Fast Iron is the first game of it’s kind. Yes, people have made spagehetti-western quick draw games before, but never like this. By using simple hand gestures and the Leap Motion Controller, players draw, aim, and shoot their guns in duels against gangs of various strengths and abilities. Players are cast as the Marshal in a western boomtown overrun by murderous outlaws. They must do battle to save the town. See a teaser here: Doing battle in Fast Iron . Is fast and dirty. A battle begins with fighting an outlaw in a gang network. You have to outwit and outshoot them to eventually make your way to the gang boss. All the while, your opponents skills are getting more complex as they become faster. The game sounds great ! Now tell me more about Leap Motion. Leap Motion is the latest and greatest way to improve your desktop experience. At Leap Motion, they believe users should be able to have an immediate interaction with their PC, without the use of any additional tools. The Controller senses your hand movement in front of the screen, allowing users to use only their gestural motions to control the game. Amazing. In July, Leap will begin offering games from within their own app-store, Airspace . How Leap Motion makes game play different than a traditional PC game . Leap allows for a higher level of game interaction than what we’ve ever seen with a traditional PC game. You feel as if you’re participating in the virtual envirnment. This kind of interaction is a completely unknown user interface paradigm. Designing for something without user expectation, or traditional schema, has been an interesting challenge. It’s been invigorating to help try to define how users will interact, while using an entirely new device. Thoughts on using Unity as our game engine. Fast Iron is our first game built on Unity . We were happily surprised by the amazing functionality provided, right out of the box. This meant going from zero to playable took far less time than expected, in spite of knowing very little about the software to start. Overall, we were very happy with our Unity experience and will use it again. Obstacles we encounterd making the game. See above. Starting from scratch with an unfamiliar game engine was our biggest challenge. While we were fortunate our studio’s art and design teams did have previous experience working in 3D environments, our enginering team did not. They were given the arduous task of quickly coming up to speed, all while working with new concepts, in order to meet our relitively short development cycle. Fast Iron was built in less than THREE months! We’re pretty proud of this accomplishment. The best thing about Fast Iron. At Massively Fun we love exploring new platforms. We’re honoured to have been invited into the Leap Motion developer beta. It’s been a blast working in this new space. What makes us the happiest about Fast Iron, is that the tools got out of the way, and allowed us to build something much more expressive than ever before. Something really special, and really fun. We were able to build our love letter to spaghetti-western’s in a much shorter timeframe than we’d expected. What’s next for Fast Iron . More. More gangs, more locales and deeper game play. We’ve got a lot of exciting things in store – we can’t wait to bring them to you. Stay tuned! Find Fast Iron Find Massively Fun McKenna Phillabaum is one of the many Massively Fun janitors. Share this: Twitter Facebook Google Pinterest Reddit blog comments powered by Disqus Google+

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