I took my TWANG Clone to ORD Camp, NERP and the Hardware Happy Hour Meetup over the past week. It got a ton of play time. I received a lot of feedback to work on.
Observations and Feedback.
It’s difficult to beat. Only one person got all the way to the boss level and defeated it. Amazingly, it was Elan Lee. He loved the game and gave me some good ideas to work on.
Most people got killed in the second to last level. It has a lot of enemies and a conveyor that keeps pushing you back to the bottom. There is also a sneaky enemy spawner at the bottom that gets a lot of people. It is a great level, so I don’t want to remove it. I have added a few more levels before it to practice before that.
The Lava Pools. The lava pools confused some people. I changed the pools to look more red, flickering and scary when they are on and less scary when off. To me it looks more obvious now what to do.
The Sound. I love the chip tune style sound out of the Arduino, but it needs to be way louder. In a large crowd, you cannot hear it at all. I think it needs an amplifier or an option for an external speaker.
Boss Level: By design, the exit at the top of the boss level does not appear until all bosses are dead. People did not understand this and tried to exit out the top early, because the boss respawns below you after the first “kill”. That caused the players to try to leave the game without ending the level. If you exited the top in this mode, the player disappeared without a way back. This is very annoying if you get all the way to this last level. I fixed the code so you can’t goes past the second to last LED when the boss is still alive.
New Features: I asked several people for new ideas. I got some to work on, but already added one. The attack width is now adjustable. It will default to the old width, but you can change it per level.
More levels. A typical game lasts about about 1-2 minutes. I think a few more medium difficulty levels would help.
Scoring System: It would be cool to know how you did compared to others. It could display the score as a bar on the strip, with the max possible being the full length. You could then mark your level somehow by the strip. (Postit note flag, dry erase pen, etc)
Next Steps
- Release all the source files.
- Firmware: I have been hacking the code quite a bit. I’ll release my changes after some clean up and testing.
- STL files: I have been using odd sized speakers harvested from some cheap external speakers. When looking looking to buy some, it seems like 40mm diameter is a good standard size that is cheap and available. As soon as I get some and test them, I will release the files for this size.
- Sell on Tindie. My shield makes wiring super easy, but is definitely not required. I think I’ll sell everything, except for the Mega and LED strip. I’ll also just sell the assembled PCB by itself.
- New Hardware:
- Raspberry Pi Zero W: I have looked into several hardware options and this seems to be a good candidate. I think it will be a simple way to get good audio and connectivity. I have the accelerometer and LED strip working so far. The audio will be an I2S amp chip that will be put on a shield. The (2) drawbacks are boot time (20-30 second) and you are probably limited to APA102C (dotstar) type LED strips. Edit: I got a good portion of the code on the Pi running. It runs fine, but I don’t like the requirement for a slow and controlled shutdown of the Pi. It would require a button and some sort of visual feedback.
TWANG Pi Zero Prototype
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