Star Sign

Inspiration

The big inspirations for this project were Portal 2 and Zodiac Signs. Portal 2 gave us the idea of our AI, Barnum, who was inspired specifically by Wheatley from that game. With the zodiac signs, we thought about how many people know about their zodiac signs, even our school has these signs everywhere, on streets, neighborhoods, and among our students. We used these signs in the game by allowing the user to input their zodiac sign into the UI, where Barnum then sees what their sign says about them. Throughout the game, he will make assumptions, snarky remarks, or just talk like crazy, so don't get too mad. Besides, your player cannot speak! Moreover, the name Barnum was actually decided by the Barnum Effect, which is a cognitive bias where people believe vague, generic personality descriptions apply specifically to them. This i.e. is what a zodiac sign does...

What it does

Barnum is an artificial intelligence that is stuck with you, using the Gemini API to generate responses to 1)slow you down and 2) annoy you. This distraction is used to keep the player from completing the maze, but that is where the most important lesson of this game comes in. Patience. If you start getting annoyed by the AI, you will lose track of where you are going and where you are from. Learn to stop, take a breath, and focus on what really matters at the end of the day, escape. In the real world, this can be applied to individuals focusing on their own. There will always be someone there, either to bring you up or bring you down. Learning to stand your ground and show no effect to words can break you free from the chains of anxiety and reaching your goals.

How we built it

The project was built in the Unity pipeline in the front-end and using the Gemini API and Eleven Labs API to generate Burnum's response and voice, respectively. We then used Flask/Waitress and Unity's b requests to make the two sides communicate. And believe it or not, it took a lot of work to get things right due to our group's refusal to use AI to do our tasks for us. We actually learned what goes on in the background of these processes, and with this knowledge, we can use it in future endeavors.

Challenges we ran into

Many challenges were faced: a) Getting the player animations as well as the animation of Barnum to properly transfer over from modeling to gameplay. b) figuring out how to get Barnum to speak to the player over the internet, complete AI implementation to speak to you. c) Handling multiple threads for the AI to interact with the user.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The web requests We are proud that we were able to create a web server that can connect to multiple instances of the game. With no prior experience to working with web requests, the fact we were able to learn about how they work and implement in a way in which the server can be connected from anywhere while it is running is something I am very proud of.

What we learned

Over the course of working on this project, we learned how to use Gemini API and connect it with Unity to give our AI Companion a unique personality. Additionally, we learned how to use the Unity Web Request feature an implement it into out project, learning how to connect with Python to share and transfer information between the two.

What's next for Star Sign

Given more time, we would have allowed the user to input their Zodiac sign and Barnum would adapt personalities based on the users sign. In the future, we could expand and make Star Sign a fun and unique puzzle game with a memorable AI companion for anyone to play. We would have also bought a permanent domain name.