Author: tirtawr

After thinking out of the concept for Death is Imminent, but Have Fun, we move forward to the planning phase of the project.

Brief Project Description

“Death is Imminent, but Have Fun?” is a 4-person multiplayer co-op game. The earth is breaking apart, all the rich people have left the earth in search of a better planet, and the only humans left on earth are the 4 people playing the game. The players have found a stranded spaceship and they must try to get it working.

Each player will be faced with a panel and a set of instructions. All players must band together to get the ship to work.

Initial System Plan

There are two options at the moment.

Option A is to have one computer connected to four microcontrollers, each of which will control the lighting and the sensors in each panel.

Option B is to have four computers, each connected to their own microcontroller. The four computers then will talk to a server which will serve as the brains of the operations.

Initial Bill of Materials

Panel Mounted Latching On/Off Switch – 10pc
Panel Mounted Toggle Switch – 10pc
Sliding Potentiometer – 10pc
Regular Potentiometer – 10pc
Large FSR – 4pc
Alligator Clips – 8pc
Monitor – 4pc
Computer – 4pc
Acrylic or Wood for the panels – lots of it
Plywood for the walls – lots of it
Silver Spray Paint – 1 can

Project Timeline

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With the final project coming around, Paulami, Nick and I started brainstorming about what it is that we want to make for our Physical Computing final.

I was mesmerized by a game called Spaceteam. It is “A cooperative shouting game for phones and tablets”. The idea is that all of the players are in a team that is flying in a spaceship, and they have to work together to keep the ship flying and out of danger. It involves a lot of communication and teamwork.

Jumping off from the game, I started trying to boil down the principal ideals that makes Spaceteam such a great game. For me, what makes it so great is that Spaceteam tries to explore the idea of facing imminent doom in a comical way. It is both absurd and scary, and the natural reflex to cope with that is somehow humor.

I try to push this idea of “facing imminent doom in a comical way” in our brainstorming sessions. During our brainstorming sessions, we try to think of things that we might want to make, we include concepts, interactions, and themes. Here is some of the result.

Concept. The concept of our creation is that we will make a game. It will be a cooperative game between 2-4 people. We want it to be fun and is immediately graspable. But we also want to have a deep backstory so that it is not easily forgotten.

Interaction. We want the game to have a lot of physically tactile interaction such as turning on knobs, sliding on sliders, switching on switches, shaking things, or even jumping. We also want to force the players to work together in a way that makes everyone is responsible for everyone else. And we want it to be loud and rowdy.

Theme. We try to go with “facing imminent doom” as a starting point. We landed on the backstory where the earth is falling apart, and all humans have left the earth, except for the people who are playing. They must then work together to try to leave earth. But plot twist, they really can’t. Death is imminent, but have fun (maybe).

After formalizing our concept for a Trick or Treat Vending Machine, Rita and I went ahead with the production.

For the sake of time, we divided the production between the two of us. I would start work on the electronics and vending mechanism, while Rita would start work on creating the enclosure.

I started work with the circuit. I used the circuit below to create the vending machine. Once I got that working, I went ahead with creating the mechanism for the display. I decided early that the brains of the operations will be the laptop instead of the Arduino, due to the fact that in the laptop, I can run a Javascript runtime, while Arduino uses a modified version of C++. As limited as Javascript is, there is just much more abstraction that can be done there that will make my life easier. I’ve put the code for the display in this repository, and the code for the Arduino can be accessed in this link. After that, I created some videos that will loop over and over in the display and serve as our animation. The videos can be accessed here.

On the other hand, Rita was working on the enclosure. We made the mistake of using cheap wood for this project. A key point that we forgot was that cheap wood tends to morph and distort. This caused some problems for us when creating the box. However, Rita was a champ and she delivered a beautiful box.

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After the two main units are done (enclosure and electronics), we went ahead with the assembly of it. We were expecting problems but things went very well. We manually coiled up a brass rod to serve as our vending machine coil, and it works like a charm. You can see the inside of the machine in the video below.

And this is the final product in action.