Endless "Skier" Alternate Controller Project

For my Alternate Controller midterm project, I teamed up with Kevin and Quin, who are also members of my senior project team. We initially came up with the concept of creating a step sensor that measures the heaviness of your steps in hopes of eventually implementing it into our senior project game Hypoxia, a VR horror game that measures the player's biometric info and incorporates it into the gameplay.

We figured that piezo elements would make the most sense to use. We wanted to make sure that stepping on them wouldn't absolutely destroy them. I figured that taking two pairs of large, squishy sandals and "sandwiching" the piezo elements in between would provide enough padding so the element remains safe. I also suggested using adjustable Velcro straps to secure the user's feet in, to make it a "one size fits all" sort of deal.

So Kevin got some Velcro straps and dollar store size 12 sandals and got to work constructing the shoes. In the meantime, I looked up how to configure the piezo element to the Arduino and tested a simple knock sensor to observe behavior of the sensor and get a feel of the various thresholds. Quin started working in Processing to create the framework of an endless runner game where you try to dodge oncoming objects by repeatedly stepping with the shoes to control your sprite's vertical position.

The endless runner kindof worked,  but it was a little finicky. We then tried having the player stand on the shoes and shift their weight left to right to control horizontal direction, giving it a sort of "skiing" feel. The sensors detect which foot the weight is on, and adjusts the speed/direction accordingly by taking the difference between the left and right foot input values.

This worked surprisingly well, and although not useful for the purposes of Hypoxia, at least we are still able to use it for the purposes of this class. So now we have an endless "skier" where you control the horizontal movement of your sprite, while numerous squares rain down from above, giving a top-down feel of a skier going down a hill and dodging trees and other obstacles. The game takes your score and you lose when you "crash." Eventually the game will incorporate appropriate graphics instead of squares and a circle with a blue background, but the central game mechanics work, which was the most important thing to focus on for now.