Gua-Le-Ni - An Action Puzzle Videogame - Available On The AppStore

"Gua-Le-Ni, or The Horrendous parade" - an action puzzle videogame - available on the AppStore for the Apple iPad

Padova (I-Newswire) December 22, 2011 - Double Jungle's 'Gua-Le-Ni' (iPad, 2011) is an original action-puzzle game that was inspired both by the British philosopher, David Hume and by a playful 'head-body and tail' Mexican book that allows recombination of animal parts.

Its bizarre concept is not the only unique thing about this gorgeous-looking title: Gua-Le-Ni is, in fact, the first commercially-released casual video game in which the development and tuning were guided by the analysis of its players' psychophysiological responses.

Starting from very early builds, The Academy for Digital Entertainment at NHTV Breda University of Applied Science (The Netherlands) assisted the Italian development team of Double Jungle in obtaining a detailed insight into the psychophysiological (or biometric) effects that their casual action puzzle video game had on its target audience. In particular, our experiments correlated stress levels and the contraction of facial muscles with in-game performance in order to establish whether 'Gua-Le-Ni' offered the cognitive challenge, the learning curve, the duration and the enjoyment the designers had in mind for their product. The psychophysiological tests for 'Gua-Le-Ni' were run together with interviews and questionnaires which supported and contextualized the biometric patterns that arose from our experiments.

Besides for its technical and methodological innovation, “Gua-Le-Ni” also offers formal innovations. To begin with, it gives traditional ‘matching’ mechanics a new twist. “Gua-Le-Ni” asks the player to recognize combinatorial beasts and to reconstruct them by actively manipulating digital objects in three dimensions. This new take on a classic game mechanic is made possible by the unique interactive capabilities of the Apple iPad.
The second mechanic which is unique to “Gua-Le-Ni” is a reverse-matching mechanics which translates into the feeding the in-game beasts with different food types. This mechanic depends on the availability of food in the playing field and on the specific food preferences of each beast. Feeding the beasts with different food combinations items can make them faster, slower, longer, shorter, more complex or more valuable in terms of points.