Ah, Bill’s Old Pills. Perhaps my favourite project as of yet. It seemed like all the stars aligned.
Our assignment this time was to make an arcade game with a self-made controller. When thinking up a concept we decided that we didn’t want a standard controller like most of the other groups and so we decided on using a handheld controller utilizing motion controls. We thought of a concept and ended up with an old sick man in a wheelchair (Bill) wanting to go outside the hospital one more time, along the way he would have to dodge all kinds of things like deadly syringes and dangerous viruses (quite topical now), the man however, had a secret power, by rotating the controller Bill would rotate the level making for some unique, challenging and fun levels.
For this project, I was in charge of making the controller, and boy oh boy what a challenge that was. I designed the look of the controller using adobe photoshop and illustrator and laser cut it out of wood. I made the controller as comfortable as possible in your hands but this meant it was a lot of work putting it together and it took quite some woodworking, lucky me because my grandfather has a woodworking station in his shed. This unfortunately was the easy part of the controller. The electronics had to be made with an Arduino. I used a button and a joystick to control Bill but this left me with one little thing, the motion controls. In the end, I used an accelerometer and put it inside the controller. I then coded the Arduino to act as a controller and connected it with our programmer’s code to control the level rotation and honestly I am incredibly proud of the result. The controller worked perfectly and it was super satisfying to play, along with the great drawing, animations, coding, sound design, and level designs made by the rest of the team I would say this is the best game I have ever worked on and it still holds out great. There was even a mode that enabled when there was no controller which allowed you to play without motion controls.
