aaron vanderbeek

Pull was created as part of the Building Virtual Worlds class at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The platform that the game was designed for is called the Jam-O-Drum. It was designed and implemented in two weeks by a team of four for the purpose of creating an experience for a naive user.

Pull is a game where you and three others fight for targets in the middle of the platform by firing variable sized projectiles. The size of your projectile indicates how quickly the targets will move toward you, and you score when the target reaches your side of the drum. You can steal targets from the other players! Watch out for skull targets and go for the rapid-fire powerup!

The Jam-O-Drum accommodates four players has two controls for each player: 1. A flat ring/disk that rotates freely in either direction 2. A button in the middle of the ring/disk. With the restraint of designing for a naive user (someone that has never played your game), we sought out to make an easy to learn, fun, multiplayer gaming experience with an awesome tutorial. The mechanic we settled on was centered around the idea of influence; you spin the spinner to grow your projectile to your hearts desire, hit the button to enter targeting mode, rotate the spinner to target, hit the button again to shoot. The larger the projectile the more influence it carries and your projectiles' will deposit their influence on a target. Once a target has been hit it will move toward you if it has your influence on it. Players negate each others' influence, so players can fight over targets.

We had many considerations during game balancing, including size range of projectiles, growth speed of projectiles, speed of projectiles, range of targeting motion, speed of targets, range of influence on targets, effects of power-ups, subtraction of influence, and the design of the level.

In the naive user test we had four players who had never seen our game before, two twenty-something males, one thirty-something female, and one forty-something female. The males, with their gaming backgrounds took to our interface very quickly and understood the interactions well. The women did not fare as well, which spoke to the inaccessible nature of our theme and interface. A strong theme that accentuated the gameplay mechanics and a more interactive tutorial are some things that could have helped us in this regard.

Game Designer: Presented concept to group, worked on game balance and playtesting, designed the level.

Sound Designer: Wrote the music and composed all sound effects for the game.