Tim Schafer’s the three-million-dollar man, thanks to a record-breaking Kickstarter his Double Fine development studio launched to fund a new adventure game. While work should be starting soon on that crowd-funded creation, the respected designer showed off a project that probably won’t ever happen at a lecture last night at New York University’s Game centre.
Using an Xbox 360 development unit, Schafer demoed two prototypes of a project called “Specs” built to take advantage of the Kinect motion-sensing camera. The main goal of the game was to give players a way to solve puzzles by using gestures to make characters react emotionally to elements in the environment.
Specs was to tell the story of a cursed, sentient artefact, whose persona gets passed on from character to character. In the video above, you’ll see an early prototype where only the emotions of love and hate were implemented followed by a later one where gestural input makes more emotional prompts available.
By the time second prototype was being worked on, Schafer and the Double Fine knew that they wanted Specs to be played through multiple times with a variety of endings available. The whole demo also serves a showcase for Schafer’s trademark humour, as well as giving insight as to how game design really happens.
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