EVIL PTY

Inspiration

The theme is “Reclaim Your Technology”, and we mean it literally!!! As technology is getting more integrated in our daily lives, it's so easy to be controlled by the digital world and lose your personal agency. Feeling like too much of your time is being claimed by your phone? That’s why we, the Yeseyesee team, are here, set out on a mission to RECLAIM YOUR TECHNOLOGY away from you! Inspired by Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes and other common games/ object such as a marble maze or a rotary combination lock.

You will play mini-games that will tie into our story of an evil company, Evil PTY, that has stolen your (and friends') technology and locked it away in a soulless corporate tower. At the Evil PTY HQ, you have to fight guards, find your way through the building, and unlock the vault to 'reclaim your technology!'

What it does

An interactive, puzzle-integrated lockbox that gamifies your digital detox by locking your phone away and forcing you to solve frantic, mechanical puzzles to get it back before the timer runs out.

Features: having real stakes (locking away a device) Being able to do it single player Personalisation on varying difficulty level and swapping modules yourself Physical mechanical elements

The build/case of the project is shaped like 2 separate towers. On one side it is the opaque Evil PTY building, whereas on the back it is a 'tower' that gets clearer as it goes to the top. This illustrates how if we look even a bit into some real life 'evil' corporations that are taking our agency away from technology, their intentions of claiming our tech as theirs are 'clear' 'evil' intentions.

How we built it

Each game was built using ESP32 and other electrical components (LCD screen, gyroscopes, joystick, rotary encoder, etc) on breadboards The code was developed on Arduino IDE Later on, all the game modules were combined together on CircuitDesigner After the logic and hardware testing was done, the games were implemented on prototype boards for better durability The box was prototyped with cardboard boxes, then later designed on OnShape, 3D-printed and laser-cut, where all the games were mounted onto

Challenges we ran into

We were ambitious by aiming for 5 games, which added to the complexity of code integration and interface consideration on the box design We soldered all the games on prototype boards for better connection and durability, which was time consuming There were a few technical challenges we had to overcome, including running all games on one ESP32 (we nearly ran out of pins), transferring from OLED to LCD screen, lockbox CAD design to fit all modules together, etc