InCel Engine

Inspiration

We were thinking about unconventional control systems and unconventional game engines

What it does

Allows multiple games to be played and controlled in Microsoft Excel and using a pair of headphones (using both the buttons and the scroll wheel) to control the games. It is a game engine! You can do anything with it!!

How we built it

We used a video playing in the browser to capture the inputs by looking at a video in the browser (every time a video is played/paused) from the headphones as a callback. We monitored the volume control for getting left and right inputs. This helped us get headphone buttons translated to inputs on the computer.

Using this we wrote a script to pass these inputs into the game engine in python which computes game logic and passes frame buffer data into a local web server

Excel then takes data from this engine and quickly and then renders it using VBA.

Challenges we ran into

• ⁠Getting Excel to actually update quickly to make the games playable⁠
• ⁠Getting scroll data and click data from wireless headphones to make it more interesting
• Making Games!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Tetris, Snake and Tic Tac Toe. Getting Headphone inputs to work with

What we learned

VBA is a bitch. Apple makes it unnecessarily difficult to listen to Bluetooth events. It is hard to make games because when you have a working demo, you just start playing it.

What's next for InCel Engine

Getting Doom to work with InCel Engine!

Built With

• javascript
• python
• vba