A delightful version of a clever one-dimensional game has been made by [Critters] which he calls TWANG! because the joystick is made from a spring doorstop with an accelerometer in the tip. The game itself is played out on an RGB LED strip. As a result, the game world, the player, goal, and enemies are all represented on a single line of LEDs.
How can a dungeon crawler game be represented in 1D, and how is this unusual game played? The goal is for the player (a green dot) to reach the goal (a blue dot) to advance to the next level. Making this more difficult are enemies (red dots) which move in different ways. The joystick is moved left or right to advance the player’s blue dot left or right, and the player can attack with a “twang” motion of the joystick, which eliminates nearby enemies. By playing with brightness and color, a surprising amount of gameplay can be jammed into a one-dimensional display!
Code for TWANG! is on github and models for 3D printing the physical pieces are on Thingiverse. The video (embedded below) focuses mainly on the development process, but does have the gameplay elements explained as well and demonstrates some slick animations and sharp feedback.
Using a spring doorstop as a controller is neat as heck as well as intuitive, but possibly not quite as intuitive as using an actual car as a video game controller.
Nice to see that I’m not the only one loving this! I think the original is the Line wobbler (http://wobblylabs.com/projects/wobbler) which both projects seems to link to. I wasn’t aware that an open source clone was available so now it’s just a matter of building one!
Technically, it has at least 3 dimensions game as each LED ‘pixel’ also conveys a hue and brightness…
Yes, TVs are 4D in my opinion.
No matter what color model you are using (XYZ, RGB, HSV/HSL, …) colors are 3D. So your TV is 5D….
7D. It also has stereo sound. 8D if it’s one of the ones that can dim it’s backlight.
16D if you count transparency effects to effectively double the layer count.
100D if you’re a drive manufacturer and round up capacity.
As others have said, 5D not 4D.
But math is a wonderful thing. You can choose to exist in your own little world and visualize your TV as a 5D hyperspace that nobody else can possibly visualize. And does your hyperspace have integer or real coordinates? Or something else maybe?
Or you can join the rest of humanity in visualizing your TV has a 2D matrix of 3D vectors. And visualize that as ….drumroll…. a TV.
What does (27,168, 2, 78, 232) on your TV represent to you? And if you say pixel at certain coordinates will have a certain color then you’re with the rest of us who say TV is a 2D matrix of pixels. I look forward to your answer on this one.
Four visual dimensions, but also the left and right sound channels and their frequency and volume.
So TVs are 7D. Although that’s just a hologram built from an underlying rf signal, filtering through an unseen hardware lens, controlled by an invisible ir signal, all controlled and built by a race of god like creatures that use it for their own amusement. :D
Funny how he advises to use the brighter LED strip then says you best run it at half brightness…
On another note, I sort of like that setup with the strip horizontal then going vertically up the wall.
I love the doorstop joystick! I would have to build two so I could do co-op with the cat (actually so I wouldn’t have to share with the cat) lol. Good job, Critters
Puppies have quite a fascination with springy doorstops too!
It could be its own stand-alone game with fight mechanics, You vs your cat. You can give the cat some sort of stimulus based on your moves to entice it to play with the controller which goes into whatever fight mechanics and display you are after.That would be pretty sweet.
This is a beautiful controller.
Great concept, well executed.
I was surprised how interesting and fun a game played on a strip of single pixels could appear. This reminds me of some of the early electronic games that were around in the 1970s: simple yet quite fun.
First off, looks fun! But an accelerometer doesn’t seem like a very good sensor for this application for one big reason… it’s located in the tip of the joystick. For instance, how can it tell the difference between between being tilted to the right and being quickly accelerated to the left? Both actions result in exactly the same reading. It’s the same reason you can’t use only an accelerometer for a self-balancing robot – it’s translating in addition to tilting. I’m sure this adds a level of challenge to the game since it makes the behavior non-intuitive. For if you move the joystick too fast, your player will actually move in the opposite direction from what’s desired. I’m sure it works as well as it seems to simply because the door stop is so short; the longer the joystick, the greater the problem would be.
It uses a MPU-6050 which is actually a 3-axis gyroscope and a 3-axis accelerometer. So it’s not just an accelerometer.
Whoops, the MPU-6050 is in fact an accelerometer and gyro combo. I wasn’t complete in referring to it as an accelerometer.
oh … i love this … .. for some reason it reminds of Thomas was Alone .. meets … Superbrothers at 1.5D ……
btw.. this game needs some piezzo music/fx
Well done Mr. Papp, I like your enclosure. I hope to be able to try the game soon.
Editor’s note: [Don] just wrote it up. The hacker is [Critters]. The kudos are still spot-on.
This work by Critters is great! Back about one year ago we took his code and made a modified version for the kids: the MPU-6050 was installed underneath a tilting platform on which the kids could stand (2 arduinos with radio transmission between platform and main board) – The 300 LEDs 5m strip was installed horizontally. This was quite fun to play and quite popular (by the number of kids playing!) at the 2016 Ottawa Maker Faire.
http://www.chezpapietmamie.com/pcube/arduino/balancuino-restez-equilibres-sinon-game-over/
I made my own version of this after seeing Line Wobbler at an exhibition. Mine looks a lot more prototype/DIY than this though. Keep meaning to go back and write more into the game, as it is you have to be a lot more precise than Line Wobbler in your movements, which makes it play quite different. It’s more 1D super Mario than 1D sonic ;)