Bongaloons (Bongo Cat IRL)

Channel your inner Bongo Cat with drums, beats, and real-time pose detection. The competitiveness + fun of rhythm games and the flexibility + immersion of multimodal controls.

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Inspiration

Our team is inspired by building a product that brings people joy.

What it does

Bongaloons is a project combining Bongo Cats and Guitar Hero, where you get to play with bongos (physical buttons attached to our custom game pad) to beats of many pop songs, meme soundtracks, and any audios of your choosing.

Features:

Guitar-hero, Rhythm-Based Gameplay

We support two forms of gameplay:

  • Using our physical drum-like controller that we built over the hackathon
  • Using the A and L keys on our user keyboard for left and right.

With this, users can play to beats that we've created or they make themselves.

Song Selection System

Built-in catalog of songs with varying difficulties (1-5 stars)

Beat map selection

Custom Beatmap Generation

Have a song you want to bongo to but don't see it in our list? You can generate custom beatmaps at various difficulties :D

Beat map generation.

We use a combination of music theory, algorithms, and big brain moves to do this.

Persistent Leaderboard

Want to race your friends at Bongo cat?

Leaderboard

Pause System

Ability to pause/resume gameplay Maintains accurate timing and score tracking during pauses

Pause System

Great Sound Design

Our teammates did a great job with sound design, but that's probably just our own opinions and brainrot vibes at 4am.

How we built it

Tech stack Instead of using a game engine, we built our own app on web, which meant we had to build our own:

  • Collider-equivalents
  • Division transformers
  • Image distortion
  • Sprite animation

This was difficult given that only one of the team member has experience with full-stack development or frontend, so in hindsight we probably should have used a game engine (lol). But it was fun because we learned a lot and it turned out great!

We used real-time websocket communication for:

  • Bidirectional communication between frontend and backend
  • Instant feedback for hits and misses
  • Synchronized gameplay state

Challenges we ran into

As expected, we ran into a plethora of challenges, but handled them with much serenity and grace. These include handling multimodal AI model development across various platforms, seamlessly incorporating hardware-software integration and tackling unforseen problems with our bongoes, and creating a cohesive design language and aesthetic ... Not to brag or anything.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We came in looking to make a fun and quirky product, and we did that and much more! By developing our hardware stack in parallel and having clean and quick integration with software, were able to really polish and expand upon our original vision.

What's next for Bongaloons

In the future, we want to incorporate full-body gestures (like Dance Dance Revolution), more unique and intuitive controllers, et cetera. Come visit us at our booth and try out our game!

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