Save Wuhu Island

Inspiration

I am a huge fan of the Nintendo Wii. Unfortunately, Nintendo pursues profits over their fans just like every other major corporation and one way they do this that irks me is by essentially forcing everybody to buy a new console every 5 years with minimal innovation and black-boxing their systems to prevent hobbyists like myself from exploring and reverse engineering the technology behind it. This is not an issue with just Nintendo, but also with major corporations in-general, who tend to be controlled by private equity firms who are pressured to pursue profit first. This game airs my frustration at one of the largest private equity firms in the country, Blackrock, but in a satirical way.

What it does

This game is based on a game within Wii Sports: Resort called Swordplay: Showdown. What you do is you go around the map in single-player mode and strike the CPU enemies with swords.

How I built it

I originally had plans to build it with my own engine that natively compiles to Wii. However, that is a very daunting task, even with AI. Instead, I built this game using Godot, which is a very simple engine that has a powerful community behind it. To get the Wii sensor data into Godot, I made a Python script that receives data from a web socket and sends it over to Godot who is listening for that same web socket.

Challenges we ran into

My biggest challenge is that I knew nothing about Godot going into this, and this is also the first time I built a game using a Wii remote. On top of that, there are some other notable gameplay issues too. Most notably, there is no vibration. I had vibration working prior, however, it kept crashing the firmware on my Wii remote so I shelved it and compensated for it with sound and visual effects. Additionally, I was unable to implement blocking features accurately. This is because my working Wii remote does not have a Wii Motion+ which includes a dual-axis angular rate sensor that would make the implementation seamless. To work around this, I included a dodging feature where you could get out of the way of a CPU enemy striking their sword.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm mostly proud that I have a well-functioning game with Nintendo-sounding music.

What we learned

I learned that Nintendo's games are usually very good because they focus heavily on sound and visual effects. You do not need content depth within the game in order for it to be highly successful. After all, Nintendo titles like Wii Sports have a very simple set of games, yet they focus heavily on sound and visual effects, making them nostalgic classics.

What's next for Save Wuhu Island

I want to enhance the UI as well as add more levels in the future, and a deeper story mode. I also want to add a boss as well as implementing vibration without dealing with firmware crashes.

Built With

• godot