Ready Steady Bang, projected on a wall

In 2017, while I was at Kaliber, Dennis Passway and I built our own version of Ready Steady Bang. We did it after work, with no client and no brief. We just wanted to see if we could.

How it plays

Ready Steady Bang is a pixel-art western duel. A voice counts down "Ready, steady, bang". Whoever reacts first after the bang wins the round, and reacting too early loses it. The bang comes at a random moment, so you can't just count along.

Ours is a single-player version. A projector throws the game onto a wall and a Kinect watches the player, so there's no controller. You are the controller.

Too hard, too easy

Latency was the thing I expected to be a problem. A Kinect plus a game engine plus a projector sounds like a lot of lag stacked up, and in a game that's all about reaction time. Surprisingly, it wasn't an issue.

The hard part was difficulty. Too hard and nobody could win, too easy and there was nothing to beat. It took a lot of playing to find the middle, and since we were both too practised by then to be good judges, we leaned on our coworkers to tell us.

Result

It's a very simple game and it worked well. We played it with our coworkers. Great fun!