By: Mohamed Ihsan.
Partner: Changqi Yu
Written on 10/26/21
Final paper prototype of our 'Smoothie/Drink Frenzy' Game
For this project, we settled on having a game called "Smoothie Frenzy". In this game, you are presented with orders on screen of drinks that customers want you to make. You have to make those drinks as quickly as possible, without mistakes, before times runs out. We may modify this project to incorporate a Christmas/Winter theme (potentially so that we could submit it for the ITP Winter Show), so that instead of smoothies, we would have you make one of a set of Winter-themed drinks for customers, based on customer demand.
An 'eating game' we considered where a character travels across the screen to eat fruits
Ways we considered to allow the user to interact with the game to 'eat' the fruit
We started by going off of an idea we came up with last week - an eating game, where you control Pac Man by rubbing your stomach and/or moving your mouth. We decided this was a bit awkward in terms of the combination of hand and arm movements, and the sanitation of it was questionable (especially in times of Covid). Therefore, we decided to try to move away from this idea, while still sticking to the concept of an immersive, physically involved game that was played in a unique and cute way.
Idea, mechanics and tools that we decided for the final brainstorm idea we decided to go to for a game.
Rough sketch of what our game platform will look like
After some thinking, we came up with the idea of a game where you made a smoothie by turning a Servo. A random assortment of fruits would be required to be made, and certain fruit were harder to blend than others, adding to the difficulty of the game. We expanded upon this to add some narrative to the game, and and expanded set of interactivity on the hardware side: namely, you have limited time to make drinks that customers ask for. You have to press buttons according to what the customers want to choose the customers' desired fruit combinations in their drinks, and then you have to proceed to laboriously blend the smoothies for the customers - all without making mistakes (if you don't want the customers to walk out in anger!)
Making the paper prototype
Final paper prototype
The prototype was mostly made of cardboard, and was composed of buttons on the left side representing the combination of ingredients that the customer wanted, while the right side was composed of the blender you had to crank to get "blend" these ingredients into a drink. As you blend these ingredients, you will see the drink being made in front of you on the screen (the image will be made on-screen using p5).
prototype of computer interfacing with the physical platform
showing what information the 'screen' interface might show
The difficulty levels of the game would increase during higher levels, and certain fruit would take longer to blend than others.
The 9 left buttons are the ingredient buttons. Just below the "Serve" button, would you might push when you are done blending - though maybe we may program the game to automatically detect when you are finished. Lastly, the servo on the right is what you will turn to blend the drink.
The schematics of this project will mainly consist of buttons for the "ingredients" that you have to choose, and a servo for the "blender" at the most basic level. You push the buttons to choose the correct ingredients, then you turn the servo to "blend" the ingredients into a smoothie.