Lionhead has been hard at work implementing seated gameplay technology for Fable: The Journey, and Microsoft has announced it is to make the tech available to all Kinect developers.
”Microsoft will float that out to everybody; our seated is now their seated and every new update of the dev kit will have that in there.”
Carr believes such technology is important for longer Kinect gaming sessions, and will help broaden the style of production the hardware receives.
”It’s our job to start to lay those walkways out to a lot of people: ‘Oh OK, seated, we can do it now, I can now think of ideas for games that I wouldn’t have thought of…’ So people will start to trust that you don’t have to be dancing to play Kinect, you can sit down and play, and it will get better and better and better.”
Lionhead has worked on seated technology ever since the Milo days, but as Carr explains, it’s been a steady process to get it ready for implementation into such a big release.
”Seated exists because we brought the technology for Milo… There’s audio empathy which is a system that we use for the horse in Fable: The Journey. All that stuff has come directly out of Milo. And a lot of the tracking systems we use are from Milo. We have our own unique skeletal system which isn’t the one that is the ‘black box’ version for Kinect. A lot of it’s very boring stuff but is effectively the infrastructure Milo was built out of. It gave us a bit of a head start, it gave us something to hit the ground running with.”
