Last November, Kris Temmerman decided to outfit the empty store-window of his Antwerp flat/studio as a playable video game for his neighbours to play as they passed by. He wrote his own Arduino-powered pixel-art game and set some controllers into the exterior window-frame and watched what happened. It turned out great, and Kris has thoroughly documented the build and released his source so you can try it too.
To make the development easy and fast, I cross developed the game as a Cinder c++ app and an Arduino app, that way i didn’t had to upload the whole thing on an Arduino every time I wanted to test something.
I didn’t use any external memory, so I had to store everything on the Arduino. I made a small app that generates c++ classes from bitmaps with some gamma correction for the led screen. I used indexed colours to save some of that precious SRAM. For driving the leds, I modified the Adafruit neopixel lib, to support alpha-blending and make it a little bit faster for my specific case.
I don’t really have much experience with generating sound and music. So the 8-bit sound was quite challenging. I’m happy with the result, but my oscilloscope broke during development of a more advanced sound lib, so its quite simple for now. But I really enjoyed myself working on the sound aspect. I have a feeling that my next project is going to be something sound/music related ;)
I’m not going to elaborate too much on the rest of the code. But you’re free to check the source code yourself (warning: its messy).
The full source code and game assets on Github (Code-> MIT, Assets-> CC attribution)
Arduino Video Game for the Neighbourhood
(Thanks, Toon!)