PLATFORM: Desktop + Physical Props
TECH STACK: Windows(Application) + Arduino(Physical Input) + LBE(Data Transmitting)
DURATION: 2 Weeks
TEAM SIZE: 5
MY ROLE: Hardware Engineer & Programmer
Tech Challenge
1. I am dealing with new hardware this time. Our current game design is to attach the sensors on physical wheels and read sensor data using Bluetooth. Unity is able to read data from one Bluetooth device but is having trouble reading from multiple devices.
2. Time is very limited. When my team decided which hardware to use, we only have one week left.
Solution
1. We found Arduino devices as our input device. Specifically, we looked for Arduino boards that have a Bluetooth unit and gyrometer sensor chip and soldered a micro-USB cable to a battery as the power source of the board.
2. The final solution to the multiple-device problem was not very elegant but I'm pretty proud of it because it worked and solved our problem. So the solution is to run 4 instances of .Net app on Windows, each of the instances reading data from one device and writing it to a .txt file. Inside of Unity, C# script will open those 4 txt files and read data from them and update the 4 wheels accordingly in the game.
Two Flew Over the ETC Nursing Home is a 2v2 wheelchair racing game with REAL wheels as player input. Each player can control only one wheel of the wheelchair, which makes the gaming experience full of fun and surprises. This is an absurd world where you need to escape the nursing home run by ETC. Nothing makes any sense but all the players just can't enough of it!
Received The First Penguin Award at the 2021 BVW Festival, ETC, CMU.
Developed on Unity with Arduino as the motion-data collecting and transferring device using BluetoothLE technology. I took over all the hardware-related work and a small portion of the Unity Engine work.
