Quest for Meowtropolis

Fred's quest for Meowtropolis begins when he finds an ancient map of the city. He encounters some evil gods. Please help save the ancient city before the evil gods take Fred back to where he belongs.

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Inspiration

We are avid cat lovers and wanted a goofy orange cat character to be our player1. We wanted to have a game similar to Temple Run and the no internet dinosaur game as well. Aislinn is a bioengineering major and completed multiple electronics labs this semester. The elements used in the lab circuits were brought into the game. Nolan is an avid gamer and CS major and wanted to push his boundaries on trying something new like coding this game.

What it does

Our pixel game involves a cat infinite runner module. Fred (the cat), is running to save the ancient city. We have a button that is used to jump, as noted by the B button. To do a shake attack, there is an accelerometer hooked in that creates circles around the player. When there is a shake attack, it kills the obstacle. There is a force sensor wired, but unused. We use an active and passive buzzer to play 2-tone music or effects. To defeat obstacles, shake or jump over them.

How we built it

We built this video game with an Arduino Mega, breadboard, force sensor, accelerometer, resistors, passive and active buzzers, 2.8" LCD screen, and Arduino IDE. We combined Aislinn's knowledge of electronics, and Arduinos, and Nolan's knowledge of general coding, C++.

Challenges we ran into

Drawing out the pixel art was a lot more time-consuming than we thought, consequently, we had to not add code for extra attacks on obstacles. We do still have the extra elements wired into the circuit, it just does not have the code to function on the LCD screen. A future project to add onto for sure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of making a real game. We know there are improvements to be made and it is far from perfect, but that is the beauty of the game. We can always come back to it later and make it fancy. We are also proud of our ability to combine knowledge of two different subjects to create something together!

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to make pixel art on an LCD screen. We both are not usually coding in C++, so that was also a learning curve with using Arduino IDE libraries that were more extensive than used to. Nolan has never learned how to build circuits and now has a good grasp on the elements needed and how to build one from a schematic. Aislinn now has more knowledge of how to connect coding projects to real-world applications.

What's next for Quest for Meowtropolis

We anticipate within the next coming months to fix the thermistor element we previously had added. We also want to make the code work with the force sensor. Both of these will allow for more variability. We would like to make more obstacles and make them more visually appealing, along with the background. As far as music, it would be nice to create our music for the game using the buzzers and the tone library in Arduino IDE.

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