Game Overview
- TFT displays a start screen illustrating the destination hole as well as the mapping between the finger sensors and remaining trap doors
- Practice controlling the trap doors, then press a button to start the game
- Move the ball through the maze by tilting the glove; the ball falling through the wrong hole results in an immediate fail
- Once the ball reaches its destination, the TFT screen displays either success or failure
- Press the button to go to the start screen and begin a new game
The basic idea of this game has already been used several times, so we wanted to build on it to increase the complexity and make it our own design. This is why we added the trap door aspect to the game; in doing so we also needed to include detection for which hole the ball fell through. One challenge we faced with this project was the shortage of pins since we wanted to control seven servos independently from one another, as well as have five IR detection circuits and four finger sensor inputs. As a result, we had to make use of the port expander in order to include all of our desired sensors, as well as a demux to be able to control all the servos. The port expander communicates with the PIC over SPI, which is rather slow, so setting and clearing bits of the port expander introduced more overhead. However, this tradeoff enabled us to include these various hardware components, and since we did not have strict timing deadlines in our code, this was a worthwhile adjustment.
Regarding copyrights, since the main concept for this game has already been reused by several different companies and apps, we believe that there are no issues regarding copyright. Additionally, this article specifically states that a similar game (Labyrinth) does not have a copyright in the United States. Our gameplay is also significantly different than that of the designs already created.