Wiimote Project

I'm not a big gamer, but I love game design. After stumbling across this site, I've been soaking up the idea of the multi-touch whiteboard concept. I've worked on design concepts that would combine the graphical and calculating power of computer games with the social interaction of board games for a few years now, but none of the ideas were cost effective in the slightest. I was playing with construction costs upwards in the 10,000's easily. I'm not rich, so they never got made. 

After stumbling across this though, I started seeing that there were other avenues I hadn't explored yet. Basically using a projector as the display device and using the Wiimote as the input reader dropped costs far below what I could have ever hoped for.

With the large step of the platform out of the way I could focus on what I actually liked doing, designing, with the luxury of having the knowledge of the system limitations. I like Real Time Strategy (RTS) games on the computer because I like RISK as a board game. I've wanted to create something that could take the best of both worlds and combine them in a board game fashion, where people could sit around a table and enjoy each others company playing an RTS style game, or something similar, with the ability to save it and walk away at any time.

So I took the game play ideas from the simplest RTS I knew and customized the controls to fit just using a single IR pen and nothing else. No work has actually been done, but the ideas are there. This is a link to the PowerPoint presentation I made that explains it.

View here:
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dhn9d2vr_16hnwgg4d6&skipauth=true

Or download here:
http://www.vioflem.com/files/wiimote/DarwiniaStylus.ppt

I didn't explain the controls and game play style of the original game, but a quick google and some youtube videos could cure you of that if you're not familiar with the game.

I'm just throwing it out in the open for feedback and whatnot, but unless someone is really gung-ho about it not much is going to happen for awhile. I plan on creating a prototype demo in the future using processing.

Enjoy,
Scott