Cooperative paintball shooting gallery

[pilesofspam]

Time to start developing another birthday project. My boys are 8 and 5 now, and I'd like for the project to work for both. My wife's Aunt and Uncle sold their Wii, but nobody seemed to want the non-standard plastic wii guns that they had, and so I snapped them up. What an opportunity to use some old equipment for a new game- we'll make a paintball simulator! The basics are that it's a cooperative play shooting gallery, but some of the targets will shoot back- they'll be photos of the family dressed in paintball gear and holding a marker. If you duck in time (picked up by a Kinect) you won't get hit, but you can't shoot while ducked. Also there will be an air cannon up front blasting the players with air (and making a nice *pop*) when the enemy shoots. Basically Hogan's Alley except you can duck too. As the game progresses, your enemies will get faster until you're knocked out. Since it's a party game, we'll set the maximum play time goal to around 4 minutes.

A few technical details:
1. Because of the way the wiimote works, each player will be limited to one position, and we can calibrate accurate fire from that position. Moving your position (and therefore your actual aim point) COULD be tracked with the kinect, but I'm placing that outside the scope of this game. Instead, the players will stand behind a short divided barrier that they can duck behind, but it will limit lateral movement.

2. All human targets will be billboards (although some may be animated). Using MD2s or another 3D format would be amazing, but we'll save that for another project that doesn't have a hard deadline.

Here's a sample screenshot of one potential arena (I hope to make a few arenas, and didn't you ever want to do this at work?) and since this is my first foray into the Kinect, I have a screenshot of the Kinect's capture of me alongside a depth map of the same scene. You'll need a few libraries to get this up and running in Linux, I'll leave details later.