Endless Skier Round 1

On Thursday, my team and I presented our first rendition of our endless skier game! We were able to amp up our ski shoes by putting in some bigger, more robust Piezo sensors. Also, after learning how to solder on Tuesday (which made me feel like a super legit engineer), I was able to attach longer cables so that the risk of accidentally disconnecting/stepping on cables was less of an issue.

I also spent a good amount of time making sprites for the game, since the circles and squares in front of the blue background from the last version were pretty dull. I found an extremely nifty site called Piskel which is basically a free online sprite editor that allows you to easily make sprites and animations. It's a really great tool and I'm definitely going to keep it in mind for future game projects.

I made rocks, trees, logs, and snowmen to use as the objects that the player has to dodge. I also was able to make a tiled border of trees that seamlessly scrolls vertically, simulating the appearance of moving through a forest. Our player character is all cute and bundled up in a pink pompom hat, puffy green jacket, and indigo scarf.. If we have time it'd be cool to be able to choose your character and have different options for player appearance.

Quin put all the assets in, Kevin put the new sensors into the shoes, and then there was a lot of calibrating to do after that. The new sensors, although an improvement, are still pretty finicky, and didn't allow for too much fine control. Not sure if there's much we can adjust unless we use different types of sensors. But it's probably worth messing around with more.

Prof doing some hardcore skiing

The showcase on Thursday was a lot of fun. It was great to see everyone's projects coming along, and there were a lot of impressive ones Unfortunately I was really bad at documentation that day (oops) so I only managed to get one picture of our professor playing the game but you can barely see anything.

Playtesting went well; the sensors were still a little finicky, and the hitboxes are pretty unforgiving, so we'll have to adjust that for the next iteration. We may also add a feature that allows a second player to manually place the objects that the skier has to dodge, giving the game a more exciting competitive aspect. I think this will greatly improve audience participation as well. I'm definitely excited to see how our final result turns out.