Double Fine Happy Action Theater (sometimes referred to as Happy Action Theater) is a casual video game developed by Double Fine Productions and distributed by Microsoft Game Studios. The title is a Kinect motion-sensing based title for the Xbox 360 and was released via the Xbox Live Arcade service in North America on February 1, 2012. Happy Action Theater is based on an idea that Double Fine's founder, Tim Schafer, had on devising a game that Lily, his two-year-old daughter (at the time), could play with. To this, the open-ended game is a collection of eighteen different modes that allow multiple players to interact in unique ways through the Kinect cameras and motion-sensing in an augmented reality shown on the console's display, such as playing in a giant virtual ball pit or walking through simulated lava.
Gameplay
Happy Action Theater is an open-ended game, providing eighteen different modes that incorporate features of the Kinect motion-sensing and camera system. Players can select any one of the eighteen modes, or opt to have the game randomly select modes and cycle through them every few minutes. The game can support the tracking of up to 6 players.
Within most modes there are no goals, only to perform certain actions for the Kinect as to create humorous results in a form of augmented reality on the console's display. For example, one mode simulates a flow of lava that fills the player's room on the game's screen, and depicts the player within it. From here, the player can kick at rocks that float on the lava, interact with small animated flame sparks that jump around, or by "immersing" themselves in the lava, can have their hands temporarily shoot fireballs to "wipe out" other players on screen for a short period of time. Another mode simulates Space Invaders, with the players required to hold their hands up and move about as to destroy attacking forces on screen; while a score is kept, the mode is endless. The game does include a limited number of achievements for certain actions.
Development
Happy Action Theater was originally announced in October 2011 as Double Fine's next project after their Kinect-based Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster project. Schafer had found that in playing Kinect games with Lili, his 2-year-old daughter at the time, that her patience and behavior would often cause havoc with the Kinect system, caused by both limitations of the Kinect systems and the hard rules of the specific game. Schafer envisioned the concept of Happy Action Theater as to create the simplest playing experience possible such that his daughter could play it without help. Schafer's idea for the approach to Happy Action Theater was partially inspired by interactive advertisements at malls which would react to people passing in from them. In following this, Happy Action Theater was developed more like a toy or playmate rather than a game, having it react to whatever the players in front of the sensor was doing without adding any conformity. To create the game's concept, Double Fine had to strip out many normal aspects of a video game and avoided added extraneous features, as to make the game "more like interactive experiences", according to Drew Skillman, the technical artist for Double Fine. Schafer wanted to avoid over-thinking any aspect of the project: the team did add the idea of Xbox Achievements, but Schafer avoided adding any more features as he felt that the more open game is "very powerful when you put kids in front of it and see how much they’re able to make out of it". Skillman admits that they could have spent time developing any one of the activities into a more elaborate experience, but felt the simpler approach was appropriate for the game.
Double Fine's team used a rapid prototyping concept to try out new modes, spending a few days to program the activity and then testing it out to see if it could be expanded upon. Several additional modes were brainstormed in this manner, including modes designed to a specific number of players, but were not further developed. Further ideas were dropped when they encountered technical limitations of the Kinect hardware, such as placing fog in the augmented reality. Some ideas were actually implemented into a mode, but during playtesting, the team found that these were not as enjoyable as they originally had thought, while other ideas came from playing with various graphics effects and expanding it out to a full mode.