Helmet Racing

Arcade-Style Motion Racing Game

Team Size: 3

Unity, Arduino, Blender

Brainstorming and Ideation:

We started by brainstorming a few ideas based on the constraint that was imposed on our group by the challenge: we couldn’t use buttons. After suggesting, discussing on pros and cons, and voting, we came down to three ideas:

1. Karting Game

   1. We could use the gyroscope (MPU6050) to track movement and a potentiometer to control velocity

   2. Based on Wooden Karts, we would add the sensor to a wood piece and the player would tweak that with their feet.

2. Cooking Game

   1. It would be a game of sequence but with colors instead. We would use a TCS3200.

   2. Players would be prompted with a recipe, where each ingredient represents a color.

      1. They would either have to memorize and repeat the sequence. Or simply work against the clock to cook the recipe.

      2. Prepare the ingredients while controlling sensors that would represent cooking actions - such as controlling the fire with a potentiometer or steering the food with an analogue.

3. Platformer w/ Speech Controller

   1. We would use a microphone and a speech library to control the character.

   2. The player would have to say commands such as “jump” or “attack” while the character moves through the map.

4. Shooter Game

   1. We we would use the gyroscope to control the camera and add a button for shooting while waves of enemies would try to attack the player.

Although all those ideas sounded fun and exciting in our head, we decided to go with the safest approach. We didn’t really know how to map a camera or how to add a speech library to Unity. Even the TCS3200 project seemed too big of risk so we went with a Karting Game.

First Prototype: Our first prototype was focused on pinpointing the digital part and sketching the physical control. To make our life easier, we made use of Unity’s Karting Microgame and simply tweaked the project to our needs. During our first experimentations, the controls were too sensitive and the slightest tweak of the MPU6050 would make the character turn full speed. To fix that, we went for a more complex acceleration and driving code, mapping the gyroscope movement in one axis. At that point, we were not sure were no put the potentiometer but we realized the wooden kart idea would not work as we intended. Our main questions were: How do we keep the novelty without compromising the gameplay? Is there something we can do that doesn’t require damaging the piloting systems we’ve built? Will we need to cancel the karting idea? Maybe changing to a flight simulator? We took those concerns to the class and our helped us to think through it.