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.
Vladimir handed it over to me while we were in the audience of Hackaday Europe. He was quite modest about it. I was immediately mesmerized by the challenge. Not too easy, not too hard. As Jenny puts it: surprisingly addictive. Glad this little gem made it to the blog!