Inspiration

Our team was primarily inspired by the many rhythm games we’ve played or heard like Beat Saber, Piano Tiles, Project SEKAI, etc. We wanted to add a fun, somewhat relatable, and goofy twist on this classic genre for everyone to enjoy.

What it does

The game features waves that approach the player according to the beat of the music playing. The player must flick the waves before they reach the shore and ruin the party, but if they flick too early, they’ll look stupid and also ruin the party. The goal of the game is to time your flicks and other actions to the beat and on screen prompts for the entire song.

How we built it

This game utilizes OpenCV and Mediascript in a python script to map nodes onto hands to track the player’s fingers and recognize flicks. The inputs are sent to Godot through a local UDP connection, where they trigger animations and are checked against waves timed to the music.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the process, we ran into issues with properly identifying the frat flick. The first rendition couldn’t properly differentiate it at all, forcing us to use a simpler pinching motion instead. Additionally, we ran into many issues with delay due to the inherent barriers of receiving input from a webcam. Computer vision technology works but isn’t always reliable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We achieved a very high level version of our original vision. We were able to create a full-fledged rhythm game with a comfortable and fun user experience. What began as a joke turned into a game so addictive that it started pulling even our teammates away from their work. Despite the many technical challenges in computer vision technology, we were able to come through with our ambitious project in a 24 hour time span. Our team is incredibly proud of how far we’ve come.

What we learned

There are a lot of aspects of the user experience that need to be considered when making an interface and game. We realized that users found the game more approachable when we thoroughly explained everything from the frat flick gimmick to the rhythm game concept in addition to the standard of controls, mechanics and objective. A storyline also helped us create a smooth transition to the game flow. We learnt how to make the UI intuitive while supporting future features, as well controlling the speed of the interface. The backend was riddled with holes as our initial design was built with python and certain python packages. As we faced a ceiling with pythons game development capabilities we switched the game logic and loop to Github. The tracker script was kept on python as we used the MediaPipe package with OpenCY to detect the flicks vs neutral position. We also learnt how to use UDP communication to send event updates from python to Github.
With the front end we learnt how to create assets efficiently using AI and how to integrate and animate them in Godot. As well as create beat mapping for tracks to keep the random patterns with the rhythm.