The Jester Game Arcade

Inspiration

Wii Kinect, X-box Kinect... we wanted a go at making our own!

Allowing players to actively move about or gesture hands gives gaming a whole different dimension and depth. And we thought it was a great idea for our FIRST ever hackathon!

What it does

We wanted to provide a home, or hub, for our arcade from which users can select their game from. And we wanted games tailored for hand gestured play. All you need is a webcam, and from there you can enjoy playing the Jester Arcade. Currently, our aim is to make special games designed specifically for the arcade, but we also want to grab a couple of web-based games that are popular on the internet. And ofcourse, games and theming were spooky and halloween-styled, in the spirit of the competition!

How we built it

The runner game, being the flagship game for our arcade, was built using Gamemaker Studio 2.
For the front-end and computer vision components we used a handful of python libraries. But most notably Tensorflow for our model, opencv for computer vision, and flask for the simple front-end.

Challenges we ran into

As this was both our first hackathon challenge, we didn't know what to expect... but fully determined to face any challenges that might come our way.
Jesal was on a Windows and Owen was on Arch Linux causing us to think carefully about how we approach development. We faced countless dependency troubles, mismatched versions, and software that simply did not work on Linux. Making sure Jesal could run the code before presentation was nail biting stuff! But we got there.