Hackathon: Nightmare

Hubworld Image
Touching da fruit

Ten Second Summary

You start in a hub world and go up to tables to see other people's "hackathon projects". Interacting with one of the projects takes you to a minigame, ranging from "definitely not subway surfers" to an "AI" that gives you suggestions on how to improve yourself. And of course, the whole thing is controlled by touching different pieces of fruit to move and interact. (Yes, the controller is literally different pieces of fruit).

The Aim

We wanted to make a project that would be unique and memorable in two key ways: the gameplay and the mechanics. For the gameplay, we thought it'd be great to try and put together a hackathon within a hackathon. A Mario Party-style selection of minigames based on other hackathon ideas we had, and some of the projects being made by our friends. This gave us a lot of flexibility to be creative and explore a bunch of different ideas for our project.

For the mechanics, we wanted to come up with a funny control scheme. So we used fruit as the controller, so touching different pieces of fruit is how you move around and play the game. This is not only fun but actually works quite well.

How we built it

The controller is connected by wiring up a bunch of pieces of fruit to an Arduino. This script puts out values depending on which fruit is touched to the serial port. Unity then reads this port and converts the values into input in the game. Each game is a different Unity scene which is accessed from a hub world, which is a bunch of tables with icons to indicate which game is which. Playing a game switches the scene, and there is a combination of both 2D and 3D games. One super cool thing is that the controls are actually variable input, not just on-off. The intensity of the movement in the game depends on the surface area of the hand touching the fruit "buttons".

Challenges we ran into

None of us have experience with Arduinos (excluding the limited amount you do in first-year computer science) so, suffice to say, we didn't really know what we were doing. It was also difficult to implement all the different minigames and hook them together in time, because they were very varied and only one of us has actually made a game before.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the controller circuit + code working so we can actually use fruit. Having variable inputs with the fruit depending on the intensity/surface area of the "button press". Getting the minigames made and actually working in time. Hooking everything together despite our inexperience with Unity and gamedev in general.