In America today, over 800,000 children and adults are living with Cerebral Palsy, also known as CP. For most individuals CP is the outcome of abnormal brain development or brain injury that occurred at the early stages of child development. CP can affect body movement, muscle control, muscle coordination, muscle tone, reflex, posture and balance. It can also impact fine motor skills. To provide a means to improve these skills, individuals with CP engage in various forms of rehabilitation, especially during the child development stages. The focus of rehabilitation is focused on improving motor function by capitalizing on the innate capability of the brain to adapt, a process called neuroplasticity. Unfortunately, rehabilitation methods can be hard and tedious. On the other hand, the Video Game industry, which is steadily growing, focuses on using technology to engage all individuals in interactive gaming scenarios. With the development of touch-based phones and tablets, video games can be played virtually anywhere by anybody. If there was a way to make the rehabilitation process more attractive to the patients, greater improvements in motor function could be attained in time. As such, in this project, the focus is to blend the engagement mechanisms provided by video games with techniques found in the rehabilitation domain. The overarching objective is to create a tablet-based rehabilitation game that will effectively improve the user’s reaction time, motor skills, and muscle control.
At the beginning of the summer when I arrived at GT to begin my internship I had no idea on the impact it would have on others and me. When I found out that I would be making a video game that would help children with disabilities improve their motor skills I realized how important my research was. I was eager to start seeing that I liked video games, I like helping others and I was at one of the Top engineering schools in the world.
The first thing we had to do before we started making a state of the art game, we had to learn how to make a game. Coming into this project I had experience in programing and writing code. Professor Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech introduced my partner and I to Unity. Unity is a fully integrated development engine that provides rich out of- he-box functionality to create games and other interactive 3D content. This was the perfect application we would need to develop our game. The First thing my partner and I had to do was paly with Unity to see how the software worked. YouTube has been a he help to me learning Unity as fast as I did. I competed seven tutorials that taught me the basics of designing a game. In the first tutorial I worked was a simple car game where I made a block car that the user could control in every direction. The trees I generated had a special code on them. If the users car made contact with the tree the car would then spawn in the location where the car was when the game first started. Placing hills in the game made it harder for the player’s car to travel across the terrain. If the car was to flip over, there was a code on the car that allowed the user to press the Space Bar to flip the car back over on its four wheels.
Upon finishing this game I felt as if my skills in Unity was not where I wanted them to be to create my own game. Before I started to work on the second tutorial my partner and I needed to brainstorm what kind of game we wanted to create.
Knowing that the game we made was going to be played by children with disabilities we focused on making a child friendly game with vibrant colors that would attract the child’s interest. The next step was to figure out the game play and how the game would be played. Knowing that the over all goal was to improve the child’s motor skill we wanted to make sure our game was very interactive to where the child can use their arms, hands and fingers to play. Here are some ideas that I came up with.
A Upper body dancing Game that Mimics dance moves on screen, works on Upper Torso, arms and hands. A Puzzle Game that Uses hands to move blocks, works Arms and Hands. Driving Game that Uses a tablet as a steering wheel, works Arms. Sports Games like Football, Basketball, Boxing, Track, works Upper Torso, arms and hands. Adventure Game where the user Travels across a island completing different tasks, works Arms, Hands, Fingers. Mine Rail Game where the user Rides in a mine rail cart grabbing different items as you pass them, works Upper Torso, arms and hands. Dot Game Like whack a mole but with dots, works Arms and Fingers. Flying Game where the users Arms are extended as if you were flying, works Arms.
With these ideas we narrowed it down to the Adventure game because there were more variables we could control while making the game and it’s a universal game that anybody could play. The concept of the game is to travel across a mysterious remote tropical island fighting off enemies with various elements. The island has three regions that the player would travel through, The Ocean level, The Beach level and The Lava level.
Now that we had a starting point I wanted to focus my tutorials around movement of characters, designing environments, shooting and enemies. The next game I started working on was a Space Invader style shooting game. The design of the game was really simple the hardest part was wringing the code. The issues I had with this program were getting the bullet to interact with the enemy and getting the enemy to explode properly. When the bullet made contact with the red capsule it would go through it and nothing would happen. I took some time until I realized that the box collider needed to be on. Once the box collier was on the game was functioning properly.
The game is running properly and there are more improvements that are needed in order to have the game working at its full potential. In our future work we plan on making the levels more detailed with vibrant colors so the game will look more appealing. Also we need to add difficulty levels for beginner and advanced players. The game is only available on android devices now but eventually it will be available for iOS and Windows.