For those of us lucky enough to have been at Hackaday Europe in Berlin, there was a feast of hacks at our disposal. Among them was [Vladimir Divic]’s gradients game, software for an M5Stack module which was definitely a lot of fun to play. The idea of the game is simple enough, a procedurally generated contour map is displayed on the screen, and the player must navigate a red ball around and collect as many green ones as possible. It’s navigated using the M5Stack’s accelerometer, which is what makes for the engaging gameplay. In particular it takes a moment to discover that the ball can be given momentum, making it something more than a simple case of ball-rolling.
Underneath the hood it’s an Arduino .ino file for the M5Stack’s ESP32, and thus shouldn’t present a particular challenge to most readers. Meanwhile the M5Stack with its versatile range of peripherals has made it onto these pages several times over the years, not least as a LoRA gateway.
As for why momentum (and gravity) makes this less trivial: it gives you options of how to get the ball out of a depression. For example you could rock the device back and forth, helping the ball climb a little higher each time (like kicking your legs on a swing).
Sounds like fun to me. It’s like a hyper minimal katamari damacy
No video of it in action, who cares.