Walk The Line
A modern arcade game created in the vain of traditional arcade games and cabinets.
Under the guidance of Mark Kleeb (http://www.kleebtronics.com) and with a team of two other individuals, we developed and created an arcade game and traditional tabletop arcade cabinet. Upon completion, we had the opportunity to display our cabinet at the barcade Wonderville (https://www.wonderville.nyc).
The game is a versus game, having the two players face off by tracing a randomly generated line. The winner is whoever followed the line more closely. The inspiration behind this game came from the simplicity yet enjoyable nature of Mario Party mini games, specifically one of my personal favorites, “Trace Race” from Mario Party 4. While tracing the line, the players will have to avoid certain obstacles, such as reckless drivers and rabid raccoons!
The main difficulties behind the development of this game came from the controls and algorithm used to determine the accuracy of the line tracing.
In terms of controls, the team wanted somewhat “difficult” or unexpected controls that almost made it less user friendly to control the characters. We were determined to use a trackball controller to add to the difficulty; however, a USB compatible trackball is recognized as a mouse by a computer, and from Unity’s point of view, the computer can only recognize one mouse. Eventually, after much research, we were able to parse the values from the different trackballs by running a C script and then sending these values to the Unity game via OSC.
The algorithm used to determine the accuracy of the line tracing went through several iterations, and faced a couple of bugs. Eventually, the game treated the plane as an xy grid, calculating the percent error between the player’s y and the line’s y every frame and then averaging these values at the end. Difficulty came from since there were two players, the two planes had to be aligned so that say the top player didn’t experience a higher percent error than the player on the bottom. We ended up with an algorithm that seemed to work perfectly in the end, and were very happy with the results.