About Dozo Quest:
Time to delve into the labyrinth! Inside there will be many foes, booby traps and obstacles to overcome. Dozo is keen on adventure, and is ready to take on any challenge the labyrinth may hold. Watch out though, rumors tell of a giant beast deep within, Muferoth guards a great treasure but has been the end of many adventurer’s careers.
Dozo Quest is an adventure game with a randomized level generator, making for a unique experience each time the game is loaded. Players pedal an exercise bike to control movement speed in game and charge their action meter used to dash through the air. Additionally, if wearing a Bluetooth heart rate monitor the game can measure the players exercise quality and rewards players for good exercise with increased damage, dash distance and health recovery.
Development Notes:
Dozo Quest as a study piece was used most often as a tool to experiment with displaying the effects of sustained heart rates and pedal speeds in gameplay. Dozo as an avatar has many unique characteristics that can be exploited to emphasis good performance. In the most basic format, Dozo would undergo a sudden transformation when the player reached peak heart rate, going from a cool toned smiling avatar with small bumps into a more rich toned aggressive avatar with pronounced spikes. This alone was quite effective in showing the players that they achieved a powered up state, but not effective if the player didn’t know this form change existed. In a study focused on rewarding players engagement with the exercise equipment, we adjusted Dozo to transform in a gradual manner. The bumps/spikes around the body would be synced with the player’s pedal speed, they would also pulse in rhythm with the player’s heart rate. Finally the colour change was eventually made to be a gradual shift to indicate something happening to the player as they reached an optimal cardio exercise routine.
Non-Study based improvements to the game included redesigning the level generation algorithm to prevent repetitive and boring levels, fixing the game balance so players would feel more confident approaching enemies, and to optimize the Network Request library we developed for Unity 4.0.4f as this game initially struggled from saturated bandwidths with too many players in multiplayer sessions.