Rhino's Quest

Controller rear view
Controller front view
Pitch

Inspiration

Mix caffeine, sleep deprivation, and crazy 3am ideas - plus a love for the environment - and you get Rhino's Quest!

What it does

Rhino's Quest is a platformer adventure where you defeat an evil Lin Alg prof. The prof has a created a machine to hypnotize his sleep deprived CS students to make them come to class. How, you ask? By linearizing gravity with linear algebra to drag them into the classroom! The unnatural gravity has a devastating effect on plant life as they struggle to adapt.

You play as Racket the Rhino, an endangered Javan Rhino, who fights back against deforestation and shoots Awake™ Bars at the humans invading his home with his trusty catapult. Navigate the levels with your custom-built controller in hand.

By advancing through multiple levels, fighting back against hordes of CS students, and discovering the evil prof's lab, you'll save the world and restore it to its natural order.

How we built it

Rhino's Quest is built on the open-source game engine Godot

The controller uses an Arduino UNO (and UNO Prototype Shield), joystick, and two tactile pushbuttons. It includes a 3D-printed shell and handwired/soldered inputs. Due to the UNO's inability to function as a USB HID device, a Python script is used to translate the UNO serial output into mouse/keyboard inputs.

Challenges we ran into

Pronouncing Godot: Go-dot or guh dow?

Soldering the controller proved to be a struggle due to the lack of equipment and the complexity of soldering to headers.

Learning Godot as none of us had previous experience with the game engine. Many things happened in Godot such as accidentally deleting a file and never recovering that. CS kids were also RigidBodies which couldn't do kinematic motion so we had weird ways of trying to make them move (they move, it's a feature, not a bug).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning Godot from the ground up
The game controller

What we learned

Godot
Fiona's life lore
Proofs of why sqrt(2) is irrationale and why e^(i\pi) = -1 as bedtime stories

What's next for Rhino's Quest

Expanding the in game lore because figuring out aspects of Godot took quite a bit longer than we expected. We want the game to have a proper ending rather than the user trying to connect the dots by reading the wiki.