A hyper-casual game by Diesel Puppet for iOS and Android. The player’s task is to draw gestures shown in the left column of each wave. You have to do it quickly, since the list of gesture icons keeps moving downward. The game also features a shop where players can unlock different dances. At the moment there are 10 dance variations, each delightful in its own way. I especially enjoy the character’s animations.
I participated in the game’s development as a programmer. The concept, graphics, Spine animations, and balance were all created by the Diesel Puppet team. The game was built on my cross-platform engine, AGE.
At first, I used a neural network for gesture recognition. For the “engine,” I tried the open-source GRT. However, I couldn’t achieve high recognition accuracy despite spending a lot of time training the network. Most likely, my kung fu was far from master level.
In the end, I completely abandoned the neural network and switched to the $P+ algorithm with some small modifications. These tweaks mainly minimized false positives but didn’t affect the core principle. It’s worth noting that this algorithm is quite fast and requires no lengthy training – you just need to describe gestures in mathematical form.
For level design and gameplay balancing, I made a web version of the game with configs loaded from a server. In the release version, this functionality was disabled.
