Inspiration
Our team has always wanted magical powers. For SwampHacks XII, we decided to create a mystical experience that allows us to cast spells. SpellCast takes inspiration from fantasy movies, like Harry Potter and The Wizard of Oz.
What it does
SpellCast follows a young apprentice collecting mana (energy) to defeat his wizard teacher. While the apprentice traverses the randomly generated terrain, the wizard is casting spells to slow him down. The wizard uses a spell-book controller and stylus to draw symbols. The symbol drawn determines the spell cast on the apprentice.
How we built it
Spell Cast was made in GameMaker. The game is built entirely from GML, and control firmware written in C; driving an STM32 to communicate with an LCD to send data, and read data. The LCD has a touch chip (XPT2046) that transmitted data by bitbanging (crude communication via clock toggling and loading), and a display chip (ILI9341) that was communicated with via SPI. The spell casted was sent to the host computer via a UDP packet that contained one of the 4 spells's signal.
Challenges we ran into
Since this was 2 of our members' first hackathon, we spent a lot of time learning the software and the format of SwampHacks. We also utilized a small touchscreen to develop the project. All of us were new to utilizing hardware. We had to work together to learn unfamiliar concepts.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to read in user input from a touchpad. This is not native to GameMaker and required a lot of research and development.
What we learned
The team became familiar with GameMaker and reading dynamic user input.
What's next for SpellCast
We would love to implement more spells, more levels, more lore, more animations, and more quality of life content for users.
Built With
- gamemaker
- gml
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