Pat Burglar

Pat Burglar is a reaction-based lockpicking game centered around the Donkey Kong Bongos.  Our character, the Beatnik Burglar, uses their magical bongos to pick the locks to safes.  When too many mistakes are made, the alarm is set off and the burglar is caught.  Players can make multiple attempts to beat their high score.

The Donkey Kong Bongos drew us in as a viable controller.  The obvious choice would have been a rhythm game, but we wanted to use them in a more creative way and choose something other than the obvious.  During one of our meetings, we started pursuing the idea of magical bongos and decided that a reaction/arcade based game would be fun to develop and play.

The controls for keyboard use are:

Q - Top Left Bongo

A - Bottom Left Bongo

W - Top Right Bongo

S - Bottom Right Bongo

Space - Start Button

While it is not stated in the main menu, the start button quits that game.

To polish this game, we wanted to emphasize accessibility.  Sound and visual queues are very important for reaction based games, but some players may have visual or auditory impairments.  As such, every decision about the bongos, audio, and visuals was discussed and made intentionally.  The colors of the bongos can be configured based on a number of common types of color blindness such as Deuteranopia (red/green) and  Tritanopia (blue/green).  The buttons are all color coded based on the settings chosen and even in the game scene, controls appear in such a way that alerts to press the top right bongo, for example, show up in the top right corner of the safe and in the color of the top right bongo.  For the auditory approach, each bongo has its own sound.  Theoretically, given practice, Pat Burglar could be played with only audio.

The experience working on the team was one of the smoothest I have experienced.  Due to our solid communication, we were all on the same page of what we wanted the project to look like.