About Wiskin Defense:
Defend the Wiskin from the approaching gatto. Wield a powerful launcher or melee weapon and fend off from the gatto as they pass through the portals on either end of the game map. There are 18 rounds in total and each round will escalate in difficulty, gradually introducing new gatto types, such as the Ninja, Heat Proof, and Parka gattos. You don't have to go in alone though, bring in as many as 8 players to take on the waves as a team, or visit the weapon smith to improve your weapon and be able to complete all the rounds solo.
Wiksin Defense is designed to be played on an exercise bike, pedaling to control their avatar's movement speed. Players must remain in motion to keep their action meter charging and continue to defend against the gattos. Additionally, if wearing a Bluetooth heart rate monitor the game can measure the quality of a players exercise and reward the player with more powerful attacks, an over head spray of projectiles for ranged weapons or a continuous and repeating windmill strike for melee attacks. The players must protect their 5 wiskin, as if they are touched by a gatto they will escape the mound and if all 5 flee then the area will be claimed by the invading gatto.
Development Notes:
Similar to Dozo Quest, Wiskin Defense was used in studies to experiment with mapping exercise inputs into visual avatar feedback responses. For Wiskin Defense the option we focused on was to emphasize the weapon getting charged up. When playing on a Bike, if the player was nearing an optimal cardio routine the ranged or melee weapon would start shaking to imply a change occurring. When the optimal cardio routine was reached for a player, the avatar would start glowing implying a new attack was ready.
In addition to the visual changes above, my development on this game was spent largely on game balance. Studying player interest in visual feedback would only be effective if the game was interesting and rewarding to play. I implemented several new powerups to the game that the player could purchase between sessions, play tested the game with small groups to gauge optimal difficulty so the player would feel encouraged to return frequently when they earned enough money for new upgrades and could push to further waves of the game, and to work on algorithms that would scale the difficulty fairly proportional to number of players and individual player skill level.