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Zombie cowboy marionettes, finger pistols, and Kinect - how does it all come together without something exploding? Twisted Pixel designer Dan Teasdale explains the complicated business of motion control design for The Gunstringer in a lengthy post on the company's blog, saying "It’s really only something we could do with the Kinect sensor for two big reasons: pure analog actions and full skeletal data."

He goes on to describe "binary" versus "analogue" control functions, and their limitations for game design, before saying that, "Like most new human computer interfaces, working with the Kinect requires you to rethink and relearn all of the interaction rules and behaviors that you’ve learned previously. We spent a lot of time with various prototypes trying to figure out what was fun and what didn’t work, and over the course of many (and I mean many) iterations we found a bunch of really cool things that the Kinect sensor does really well.

"Marionetting isn’t about binary actions like 'move in this direction at x speed' it’s about the analog feel of a puppet. Because of that, we ended up building a unique control system that uses your hand, wrist, arm and shoulder to determine how to move the Gunstringer through the environment."

After a fairly complex and technical exposition of this, he concludes that, "In layman’s terms: you get to pew pew enemies with your hands."

Which is really all I need to know.

[via Joystiq]