Minmon

The Game

Minmon is a multiplayer game designed for large interactive spaces (like the Deep Space). In Minmon, players can create monsters by freely moving around the space and collecting parts for their Minmon. Depending on the space, they either see the game projected on the wall in front of them or directly below their feet. Whenever they want, they can immortalize their creation by entering the edge of the playing field and start creating a new Minmon.

Here’s a short demo of Minmon. On the left, you can see the game itself, on the right I am simulating tracking data with my mouse – this is normally done by moving around a physical space.

Minmon was designed to foster emergent gameplay. The mechanics are very simple, there are no predefined objectives and no ways to win or loose. Instead, the idea of Minmon is to give people simple building blocks so they can be creative and come up with their own objectives.

There’s really only one rule:
There are no mistakes.

As soon as you attached a part to your Minmon, there’s no way to remove it again. Also, there’s no way to attach a part perfectly, as the parts a constantly moving around and rotating. That way, players are forced to embrace imperfections. The sketchy style of the base shapes and parts mirror this philosophy.

Minmon is most fun when played with many people, and the only limitation for that is the physical space available.

After some time, the game becomes quite colorful. The sidelines are filled with dozens of unique Minmon, some happy, some sad, some silly, some serious. It’s a beautiful mess!

The Development

Minmon was developed for the course Game Spaces during my Master’s at the FH Hagenberg. I came up with the game concept and handled the implementation. The other team members were responsible for art and sound.

Minmon is implemented in the Unity game engine. For the tracking of the position data, I used a template provided by the PIE-lab. This template supports tracking protocols like TUIO to access position data (e.g. from laser rangers set up in a room).

Here’s a demo of the game using prerecorded tracking data.