My final project will be a short game/experience inspired by the wish lanterns in Disney’s Tangled and will use the artwork I did all the way back in week 3:
I want users to be able to send out their own wishes. Before they can enter their wish, they must complete a short challenge. The challenge is a physical reaction-time game: four lanterns (each with an LED inside) are paired with four corresponding push buttons. The lanterns light up randomly at a fast pace, and the user must quickly press the button for the lantern that lights up, essentially “whacking” it. Their successful hits are tracked and displayed in p5, with a similar sketch as the one above as the background.
Once the user reaches 10 successful hits, a text box appears in the p5 interface (as already present in the sketch above) where they can type their wish. That wish is then displayed on an Arduino screen, all the lanterns light up together, and the Tangled music plays to complete the experience. After this, the p5 screen gives the user an option to restart the experience all over again.
The Arduino handles all the feedback related to the physical input:
it flashes the LEDs in a random, fast paced manner and detects corresponding button presses by the user. Every time a lit up LED’s button is pressed on time, it sends a signal to p5 to increase the score of the user by 1.
On the p5 side, the sketch handles the game logic, tracks the score, maintains the aesthetics, provides the textbox to enter the wish, and sends the wish back to the Arduino. It also gives instructions at the start of the experience to the user and gives them an option to restart at the end.
To get started, I tried to implement the reaction-time game logic with the score-tracking on a small scale using just my own Arduino, breadboard and 4 LEDs. It mostly works, but the LEDs light up too slowly (ignore the interface also):