Shouternity

Created by Joshua Cheng (JC), Robert Jauregui, Sambhav Poudel, and Victoria Liu

Inspiration

It's not too hard to make a simple obstacle course game, but we wanted to spice up the challenge by incorporating an element of 🗣️ auditory chaos 🗯️ to the challenge…

What it does

🔊Shouternity 📢 is a game that features an obstacle course that your character must smoothly sail through in order to survive. However, the twist is that you can't actually use your mouse or keyboard... you must actually use your voice to enable the character to fly!

How we built it

We designed and animated a player dragon that would move based on the presence and loudness of the audio input, generated by the speaker's voice; to do this, we used Python’s SpeechRecognition library as well as incorporated threading for proper audio detection. We implemented a scrolling background to add additional depth to the character's movement, as well as an obstacle course that randomly generated obstacles at different places for the course. We also checked for collisions between the obstacle group and the player to terminate the game, as well as experimented with a restart button and a score counter, which we hope to properly implement and refine in the future.

Challenges we ran into

Since each developer was working on their code locally, we learned to properly utilize Github's control version elements, such as branching and merging conflicts. This was important especially when it came to combining the game interface and the speech recognition elements together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since we created multiple parameters to control the physics of the character's movement, this game can be easily adjusted to work for a louder environment (by increasing the threshold required for lift), or can also be made easier or harder (by changing the velocity and acceleration) depending on how fast the character moves. We are also proud of the fact that we were able to integrate the audio and visual features together, and the way we incorporated the animation of the character.

What we learned

Three words: Actively merge conflicts

What's next for Shouternity

We have so many cool ideas in mind! We would like to properly implement a restart button as well as a score counter and highest score tracker that would track how many obstacles the player has passed. Another update could include allowing the player to customize the character design as well as background design of their choice.