Creative GameDesign | Magnetic Planetic

Magnetic Planetic is a galactic arcade game for young and old on the Microsoft Surface. It is played with your fingertips only.

The player steps into the position of a planet threatened by an invasion, which has nothing left to defend itself but 2 moons. These two moons are the only controllable elements in the game. One has a high magnetized attraction; the other is able to repel matter magnetically. By positioning the moons it is the task of the player to maneuver approaching enemies into a nearby black hole. This is the only way to stop the opponent and save the beloved home planet. The enemy appears in form of small or large non-planetary space crafts, which are all heading to the planetary surface.

In increasingly difficult waves the opponent engages until eventually mother ships show up, that are harder to defend. The planet can withstand 10 collisions with the opposing units. If the player manages to fend off all units before the planet was hit 11 times, he will win the game. If not, the enemy invasion will be successful.

Game Over.

Why use a Multitouchtable?

In the early stages of our ideation process we came across the idea of two magnetized poles. We didn't want to engage enemies directly, we wanted to change the world around them and make a game around that theme.

For this to work in an elegant way we were looking for systems that would enable us to use two fingers for controlling those poles. With different systems at our disposal we eventually decided to use the Microsoft Surface because it was the best suited one for our needs.

This kind of technology is able to create a completely new way of playing games and, more importantly, feeling games. There is no top side and no down side. You can freely roam around the whole table and play from every angle. You could also get some buddys to join you and play together at the same system with the same screen at the same time. Those conditions got us very excited and eager to try and see what we could come up with.

How did we do it?

We would like to thank the students of Konstanz University and their research project „Squidy at the Konstanz University“ for creating SurfaceToTuio, thus enabling us to use the TUIO-libraries on the Microsoft Surface.

Those libraries can be used in Processing. TUIO-Zones enables you to draw zones onto the Surface which can be used and altered in different ways.

The actual code for the game was then created in before mentioned Processing, an open-source programming-language and environment.

Regarding this we would also like to thank Matthias Löwe for helping us with various parts of the code.

Where can I get it, is it finished?

magnetic.planetic is the result of a three week long workshop on creative game design hosted by Jochen Fuchs, Susann Hamann, Matthias Löwe, Sebastian Schwinkendorf and Anne Wohlauf. During that time we made rough game-concepts, some paper-prototypes and finally decided to get to work on the Microsoft Surface.

Unfortunately we weren't able to complete our work on the game in the short amount of time we had. This means the game, this microsite, our picture- and our videofootage are all in beta-status.

We are currently working hard to finish everything in a more complete sense, meaning different races, more levels, and some other tricks and tweaks we couldn't implement so far.