This game was developed for PC and was playable by using Nintendo WiiMotes. We used the WiiFlash server to connect the WiiMotes to Adobe Flash.

For this project we created three different games that fit the theme of Sesame’s The Electric Company.

Secret Agent

In Secret Agent, the players are stuck in the jungle and must find a way out. In order to do so, the players must find ways to get around certain obstacles. They can do this by spelling out the given object that will help solve each situation. There are two arrays of word parts on the left and right side. Based on the given picture and audio cues, the players must choose the correct word parts that spell out the object in the picture.

Say What

Similar to Secret Agent, in Say What, the players must choose from word parts in the word clouds that spell out the object in the given image. When they have correctly chosen, the word parts animate out of the two faces’ mouths to combine the two word parts.

Karate

Lastly, Karate is a little different from the previous two games. The left player must make a chopping motion to chop a word in half that’s placed on a rock. Once the word has been chopped in half, they must choose which half to sweep away. This is indicated by the audio. When they have correctly swept away half of the word, the right player must choose the correct word part from a word cloud. Again, the correct word part is indicated by audio. When the correct word parts have been chosen, the players cooperate and make a squishing gesture to squish the two word parts together to make a new word.

The grammar that determines the layout of the road is as follows:

Axiom: F
Rules:
F -> F - F
F -> F + F
Symbols:
F: straight line forward 2 units
-: turn -90 degrees
+: turn 90 degrees

As you can see, this is a very simple grammar; but this was all we needed to generate some interesting looking cities:

The regions are then filled to mark the grass, buildings, sand, and water areas. Any regions that are found to be buildings must go through a noise filter to randomly determine the height of each building. The following is a sample output for a simple city:


w -> water
g -> grass
# -> buildings (the # is the number of stories that the building has)
the rest -> roads (I tried using characters that closely matched the road's characteristic, such as T representing a 3-way intersection)


After the heights of buildings have been determined, another grammar is used to generate the buildings.

Axiom: A
Rules:
A -> BFCCBCCBDRRRRRRRRR
A -> BCCCFCCBDRRRRRRRRR
A -> BCCFBCFBDRRRRRRRRR
A -> BCBCCCCFDRRRRRRRRR
D -> CCBBCBCBBD
D -> CBBCCCCCBD
D -> BCBCBCBBBD
D -> CCBBCCBCBD
Symbols:
B -> wall
C -> wall with window
D -> wall
F -> wall with door
R -> roof


Each building’s floor is made up of 9 blocks tessellated 3×3. Each block can be a wall, window, door, or roof depending on the string generated.

The following is an aerial view of the whole city once generation is completed.

Here’s a video of the city being generated:

Separation avoids colliding with other boids or obstacles. Alignment steers each boid in the general direction that the whole flock is headed. Cohesion keeps the boids herded together.

I also included a predator boid that spawns every so often and gives chase to the closest boid. Of course, all the boids try to steer away from the predator boid. Escaping from the predator has more weight than cohesion and alignment, thus resulting in the flock occasionally breaking up and going in different directions.

The goal of the game is to grow and maintain a garden through a gestural interface. There are separate gestures for blowing in seeds, blowing in clouds, making it rain, and making the plants grow.

At the project’s current state, there are locusts to eat the plants, spiders to drive the locusts away, bees to pollinate the flowers, and birds to eat the fruits. We plan on adding many more elements to the game.

My main tasks on this project were to write the AI for the spiders, to determine flight paths for the birds, and to create a user interface that can be interacted with through gestures.

I have had such an amazing time working with this technology and working with everyone on the team.

Visit the website to see the game’s progress!