David Carratu
Paul Gelhaus
 
Jumbo Hunt Video Game Documentation
 
For this project we created a “top-down” style video game. The objective of the video game is to move the character around the background, a satellite image of the Tufts campus, to find Jumbo. For the background, we took a screenshot of a google earth view of campus and for the character we cropped the face out of a full image.
 
For the user interface we created a controller consisting of two large motors mounted to the brick. One motor controls left and right movement while the other motor controls up and down movement. The character moves if the motor is being rotated and remains still if the motors are not being rotated. The user moves the motor by rotating the rubber tire attached the motor. So in this case, the motors are being used as sensors (inputs) instead of outputs.
 
For this project we programmed in LabVIEW. We also display the video game on the LabVIEW front panel. Therefore, the code is run on the computer and just receives the motor inputs from the brick. The program works by first opening up the png files for the character and the background. The program draws a subset of the background map on the screen. Then it draws the character over the background. The program also constantly checks for rotation of the motors. When the motors are rotated the character moves corresponding to which motor was rotated and to which direction. If the character moves off the screen, then the character is reset to the opposite side of the screen and the map subset changing showing a new background as a different part of the map. This allows the user to explore the entire map to look for Jumbo. The user wins the game if they can find Jumbo, who is hiding on the Tisch library roof. Our goal was to have “You win” appear in big letters across the screen when the character is on top of Jumbo. However, we had difficulty figuring out how to perform the “in the range of” function in this code since Jumbo changes with the background changes on the screen and the character changes position relative to the 2D Picture screen.