RUN THE GAME
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To start of, my research. When thinking about ideas for the theme play, I kept thinking about building a game, so I started looking through games that I enjoyed playing. My biggest inspiration is an online game called Run. I used to play this game all the time when I was younger, so it feels more personal and nostalgic to me. This a very simple game where an alien is travelling through space inside an endless corridor and it has to avoid the openings on the floor. Once I had settled on this idea to recreate an analogue version of this game, I started looking through other projects that I could use as inspiration. I mainly used the Arduino project hub to get ideas. Since in the original game the corridor rotates, I thought I could do something similar, however, I realised that that was a bit too ambitious so I decided not to do it in the end. This is why I was also looking through examples that did this in a similar style. After this, I started sketching how the project would look, here are some of the sketches. You’ll be able to see in the end that the project didn’t end up looking the same as the sketches because I had to make several changes along the way.
Passing now to the second part of the project, the prototyping. I first started working out how to make animations on a Led matrix. I learned that I could use binary or hexadecimal to assign which pixels would be turned on. I quickly realised that this would take me quite a long time to code because I would have to code each pixel individually, however, I found a series of online led matrices generator that would help me speed up the process. Here are short videos of some exercises I did with it. (Show videos) I went through each component individually or that were directly connected because I thought this would be the most efficient way to work. I then worked on the joystick with the motor. I had a lot of problems with this because my first stepper motor didn’t work. As an alternative, I used the servo motors that come with our kits, but I realised that those motors have a potentiometer inside that doesn’t allow them to turn more than 180 degrees, and I need the motors to turn 360 to run a timing belt. Finally, I got a continuous servo motor that would turn 360 but whenever I would turn the joystick back to the middle so would the motor. I fixed this by mapping the position of the joystick with the motors, and to make so that when the joystick was in the middle to not consider this as a value to move the motors. Here is the general schematics of my project and all the components that I used. After having all the components working I started assembling everything together, and here’s a video of me building it. I choose to use legos for my prototype because during one of the session a lot of my colleagues told me that the game had a very retro feeling to it, so I decided that this would give more of that retro feeling than using cardboard like I originally planned.
Passing now to the final piece, these are some pictures of the project. I ran out of legos, but I think it still gives the idea that I originally had. This is a one-player game, where the player has to move a joystick left to right to avoid the red squares on the matrix. If the player fails to do so, a buzzer will beep.
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