PaujoBreaker was made by Joris La Cancellera & Paul Humez for a school project in the French engineering school Telecom Lille.
We had 2 days (and 1 night) to ‘do something cool with a Kinect V1 device’.
We decided to remake a Breakout (brick breaker) game, but party game oriented; Party games and motion gaming fit so well !

PaujoBreaker is a two players game. The screen is divided into two distinct area, one for each player. Players play next to each other in front of the screen.
A game session is composed of three levels, players access the next level by cleaning all their bricks. At the ends of the party (end of level 3 or run out of hearts), the higher score wins. Some bricks can loot +1 life or extra score objects that fall down. You must catch them with the paddle in order to activate the effect. It can be a bonus for yourself or for your opponent depending on the color.

The game is quite simple to play:

  • The paddle classic left-right movements are linked to the player’s body position.
  • The paddle’s angle can also be adjusted with hands. It makes the game more challenging and shorten.

For technical reasons, the two players interactions are quite limited. Overlap of the two players in front of the camera was not well supported, leading to tracking issues and player reversed.

Here is some gameplay idea that we could not implement on time:

  • An object that allows balls to bounce out of the players’ area for 10 seconds.
  • An object that mirror the game (and force the players to switch).
  • Send a spell to the opponent (slow the ball…) by doing a dance or a funny gesture. The opponent can counter it by repeating the gesture right away.

We added a negative canvas at the bottom of the screen that represent Kinect’s capture data during our development stage. It turned out this feedback loop was helping users to understand how to play. Affordance, affordance !

You can check one gameplay session and presentation here: