About Biri Brawl:
Biri Brawl is one of the seven games I helped develop at the EQUIS Research Lab. Biri Brawl is a networked multiplayer game that supports up to 12 players at once. The game features the "Biri" as the player avatar, a microscopic organism which loves to boop other biri with its large nose. While the Biri are resilient they need to take a break every now and then, if their health bar depletes they will become transparent and can no longer be hit while they take a quick rest.
Players must pedal a exercise bike to move in game and charge their "Boop" strike. Additionally, if they are wearing a Bluetooth heart rate monitor the game can determine the effectiveness of their exercise and reward them in game with increased base damage output when they land a successful hit and health recovery rates as they circle around the arena.
Biri Brawl has been designed as a high action video game for children with fine motor control impairments. The simplistic round stage and limited range of motion makes the game more forgiving when control of a small controller joystick would be difficult. The game has been used in clinical studies to test balancing algorithms that improve a players aiming and timing capabilities.
Development Notes:
In terms of features, Biri Brawl started as one of the most complete games when I joined the EQUIS Lab. My time on Biri Brawl was spent more on refinement than new development.
The game initially provided poor study results due to how rounds were handled. Biri Brawl was often used to study Aim Assistance Algorithms for players who struggled to orient a joy stick and/or press buttons in time sensitive situations, such as a close pass of another biri. We worked on implementing a pair of algorithms that would provide both motion tracking assistance as well as stretching or shortening the player’s lung distance to predict the player’s timing and ensure more frequent hits.
In addition to assisting on the above algorithm development, I had worked on testing options for scoring in game that could yield more useful study results. Initially Biri Brawl was played with a round timer and the winner was the player with the most successful hits by the end of the designated play time. With our player group being users that struggled to aim, and the cost of needing to refill your action bar on a missed lung already being high, we found this game mode provided few data points and those that were recorded were skewed towards a risk-adverse playstyle. When experimented with, we found shifting the game to have a first-to-3-player-defeats win condition that this improved our study data immensely. Players felt more encouraged to lung on a near-miss in the chance that they might land a final blow, and feeling safe in that being hit once while recharging wouldn’t put them at a disadvantage. This mode also gave confidence to lower scoring players to engage in action as natural tendencies of group play kicked in and players at 1 and 0 points wanted to prevent the few at 2 points from ending the game.