GAME
Barrel Dash
A full-body gesture runner on Kinect, plus a touch build for mobile.
- Year
- 2024
- Duration
- 1,5 Months
- Discipline
- Game Design
- My role
- Kinect interaction & Unity development
- Team
- Seymur MammadovAlice ZanuttiFelix Prince
Barrel Dash is a Unity-built, Kinect-powered runner set in a light fairytale world. Players steer a mischievous goblin toward a castle, collecting coins and dodging obstacles using full-body gestures, turning, and leaning instead of tapping.
I worked on the Kinect interaction and developed the experience in Unity.
Challenge
Biggest hurdles were technical and interactional. With zero Unity background, we had to learn scene architecture, physics, and input systems while integrating an aging Kinect stack. Sparse documentation meant refactoring legacy scripts, debugging skeleton tracking, and stabilizing gesture recognition (false positives, latency, calibration). We also rethought difficulty pacing for bodies of different sizes/rooms, adding feedback cues and safety margins so kids could succeed without exhausting motion.
Results
We shipped a playable Kinect prototype plus a touch-based mobile build. A simplified gesture pipeline, tuned thresholds, and clear on-screen prompts improved reliability and first-try comprehension in playtests. Kids and young adults reported the movement felt “fun and intuitive,” with better coin-collection rates after calibration tweaks. The project produced reusable input modules and a documented setup guide, turning a fragile demo into a repeatable classroom artifact.
Set Up & Game Play
Inside of the project
Mobile Version
Stack
Github Access
Conclusion
The project produced a playable Kinect prototype and a mobile build, with reusable input modules and a documented setup.