Smartphone Invasive Duck Hunt

Inspiration

We wanted to create something fun, interactive, innovative, and accessible. Something that people could easily attain access to (with no downloading).

Since we all had smartphones, we chose to make it something smartphone related. All of us being gamers, we came up with the idea to make a game.

We arrived to the conclusion of making a retro-style arcade game for which people can use their smartphones, regardless of brand (provided gyroscopic tracking and accelerometer is supported).

What it does

Our project makes it possible for players to interact with the games they play in ways that in the past required paraphernalia with limited accessibility - for instance a game console. With audio feedback, our web application will transform your smartphone into a small but powerful arcade game controller.

How we built it

Using javascript, java, the node.js API, html, we recreated the game "Duck Hunt" as an Express server, with the targets being the White-Faced Whistling Duck, an invasive species.

Challenges we ran into

The first obstacle we had to overcome was getting the smartphone to behave as a laser pointer. This was difficult due to the greatest flaw of the smartphone gyroscopic tracking system - gradual drifting. We countered this through making our own method of measuring direction - using gravity as a reference point for accelerometer based angle calculation and combining the two angles in a complimentary filter (chosen based off of the long term and short term performances of the two sources.

The next obstacle we faced was getting a game screen represented by a separate web page on the hosting computer to display events corresponding to player input. This took the most time as there was only one member in the group fluent in Javascript, and the rest of us had to learn.

Finally, after completing the game itself, we wanted to create a fancy tutorial-like setup process. We experimented with sprite sheets, but after hours of difficulty in getting the final frame of the sprite right resorted to illustrating it frame-by-frame manually. This however also did not work out for us, and after more hours of glaring at loops we chose to instantly change the frame itself.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that, despite 75% of the members not knowing the language needed to program our chosen project, we pulled through.

What we learned

The biggest thing that we learned at Hackathon was the importance of patience. Many many times we faced undesirably colorful text or no text at all at the hands of missing brackets, mismatched semicolons and colons, and things we forgot to remove. Persistence, resistance, and tolerance to subzero temperatures allowed us to drag ourselves past the finish line.

What's next for the Smartphone Invasive Duck Hunt

The next steps for us are expanding the games available to people. Improving game aesthetics, accessibility, and selection will be our steps looking ahead.

Built With

• computer
• html
• html5
• javascript
• node.js
• smartphone