Cycle 3- One-Handed Ninjutsu

Posted: December 12, 2019 | Author: Harmanjit Singh | Filed under: Uncategorized |2 Comments »

This project was inspired by an animated TV show that I used to watch in middle school; Naruto. In Naruto, the protagonists had special abilities that they could activate by making certain hand signals in quick succession. Example:

Almost all of the abilities in the show required the use of two hands. Unfortunately, The leap motion controller that I used for this project did not perform so well when 2 hands were in view and it would have been extremely difficult for it to distinguish between 2-handed signals. However, I feel that the leap motion was still the best tool for hand-tracking due to its impressive 60 frames per second hand tracking that was quite robust (with one hand) on the screen.

Some more inspirations:

I managed to program 6 different hand signals for the project:

Star, Fist, Stag, Trident, crescent, and uno

Star – All five fingers extended

Fist – No fingers extended (like a fist)

Uno – Index finger extended

Trident – Index, Middle, Ring extended

Crescent – Thumb and pinky extended

Stag – Index and pinky extended

The Jutsu that I programmed are as follows:

Fireball Jutsu – star, fist, trident, fist

Ice Storm Jutsu – uno, stag, fist, trident

Lightning Jutsu – stag, crescent, fist, star

Dark Jutsu – trident, fist, stag, uno

Poison Jutsu – uno, trident, crescent, star

The biggest challenges for this project was devising a robust-enough algorithm for the hand signals that would be efficient enough to not interfere with the program’s high frame rate.

And two: Animations and art. Until you start working on a game, I think people don’t realize the amount of work that goes into animating stuff and how laborious of a process it is. So, that was a big-time sink for me and if I had more time I definitely would have improved the animation quality.

Here it is in action: https://dems.asc.ohio-state.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_8437.mov

Some pics:

You can find the source code here: https://github.com/Harmanjit759/ninjaGame

NOTE: You must have monogame, leap motion sdk, c++ 2011 redistributable installed on your machine to be able to test out the program.

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