Second semester Medialogy meant the opportunity to participate at the Roskilde Festival (2013) in collaboration with the Aalborg University. My group and I made a game that won that collaboration = free tickets to the festival! OH YEAH!
“Rolling Rampage” - an arcade coffee table with a game about pushing your opponents off a moving platform, while each is controlling a ball-shaped controller.
The game was designed during our second semester in Medialogy, where we did a study on designing interfaces that are easy to understand and approachable, to encourage people to interact with each other through a game. We explored a few game mechanics and made a simple but very fun game. The idea is for it to be playable with one hand, to have short rounds and to make people face each other when playing. It's easy to set up and tear down (just plug it into the wall and it starts up), and it's easy to start playing (start rolling the ball).
We built a physical table with the help of my dad who makes furniture. He shipped the wooden pieces from Romania and we assembled them in Copenhagen. Inside the table is a small windows computer running the Unity game, a screen with plexiglass and spill protection (just some tape) and four computer mice, placed upside down.
The mice plus some ball bearings hold four silver balls above them, and as the balls rotate the mice detect the rotation and talk to the game. Since it's not possible normally to connect multiple mice to a computer and have the input work separately, we had to use some weird code - a c# library named MultiMouse or something like that, I forgot really - that could read the mice separately, and it would send the info via sockets to the Unity game in the background.
It was a fun project and it threw me into the world of experimental games and alternative controllers.
Unfortunately it is not well documented, so all I have is the video from Steven Gelineck, our group supervisor for the semester.