Plunder Planet

A game that makes you love to move!

Plunder Planet is a physical exercise game based on the concept of Dual Flow: The game dynamically adjusts its difficulty as well as complexity level to current physical and emotional states of the player during the training session. Thus, the game always guides the player to his or her individual perfect training mode and provides a maximum effective and motivating training experience.

During the training, the player immerses into the world of a young pirate who dashes across a deserted planet with his flying pirate ship and goes hunting for valuable treasures. The player has to avoid stones, aggressive giant sandworms and other obstacles. The game is played with either the Kinect or the Full Body Motion Controller, which consists of six big buttons around the player. A heart rate sensor is monitoring the player's physical challenge while the game’s algorithm is measuring the mental stress. An accompanying trainer app offers the possibility to manually adjust the frequency of obstacles in real-time in order to reach a predefined individual training goal.

This project is an interdisciplinary cooperation with sports scientist and game researcher Anna Martin-Niedecken from the Zurich University of Arts. She researched the question, if a game with the Dual-Flow system can be used in addition or as an alternative to standard fitness programs[1]. Additionally, she studied the impact of two different game controllers on the game and spatial presence experience[2]. During the playful training session children were highly motivated, achieved great training levels and had a lot of fun. They all forgot time while moving around due to being so immersed in the game[3].

Images

Concept Art of the setup of the game. It can be played with big buttons around the player or with an Xbox Kinect.
Collecting blue gemstones on the way will get the player points.
Crashing into rocks or getting attacked by hostile creatures will reduce the points.
Left, front and right of the player are the six different buttons for moving around and activating the ship's shields. A heart rate reader is sending signals to the game, controlling the pace of the game.

Publications

  1. Martin-Niedecken, A.L. (2019). - Plunder Planet: An Adaptive Fitness Game Setup for Children - DOI:10.1145/3290607.3311765

  2. Martin-Niedecken, A.L. & Götz, U. (2017). Go with the Dual Flow: Evaluating the Psychophysiological Adaptive Fitness Game Environment Plunder Planet - M. Alcañiz et al. (Eds.): Serious Games, LNCS 10622, Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Serious Games (JCSG '17), pp. 32-43, Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-70111-0_4

  3. Martin-Niedecken, A.L. (2017). Exploring Spatial Experiences of Children and Young Adolescents While Playing the Dual Flow-based Fitness Game “Plunder Planet”. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Application (CHIRA '17), pp. 218-229, SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications. ISBN: 978-989-758-267-7.

  4. Martin-Niedecken, A.L. & Götz, U. (2016). Design and Evaluation of a dynamically adaptive Fitness Game Environment for Children and Young Adolescents. - In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY '16), pp 205-212, ACM: New York, NY, USA. ISBN 978-1-4503-4458-6. DOI: 10.1145/2968120.2987720.