Difference between revisions of "F21: Space Rage"

Revision as of 19:01, 14 December 2021

Grading Criteria

Project Title

Space Rage

Abstract

The Tron Light Cycle game is a versus game where two players, in this case one player and one computer, attempt to have the opponent run into their trail that is left behind as they move. It is similar to Snake, but the trail left behind is not dependent on any pickups and it is competitive. The player(s) are able to move in the cardinal directions, North, East, South, and West, and are not able to steer directly behind them to prevent instant defeat.

There are two levels of AI a player make compete against: Normal and Hard. The difficult of the AI is dependent on which controller the player is using: Player 1 faces the Normal computer while Player 2 faces the Hard computer. The selection of game type is done from the main screen that shows 1 Player or 2 Player. After the selection, the players are free to choose normal mode or turbo. Turbo mode allows for the pressing of the button on the controller to allow the player to move faster.

The display is a 64 by 64 LED matrix. The player controls their ship by using the joystick and button in the controller. The button located on controller allows the user to select options from the main menu and go turbo mode while in that game mode. There are four speakers for the cabinet: two to play music on either side, one for sound effects related to player one, and one for sound effects related to player two. The volume of the speakers is controlled by a touch sensor that is attached to conductive tape which is attached to the side of the cabinet.

Objectives & Introduction

Show list of your objectives. This section includes the high level details of your project. You can write about the various sensors or peripherals you used to get your project completed.

Team Members & Responsibilities

• Jonathan Beard Gitlab
  • Core game logic
  • Animation development
  • AI construction

• Jonathan Tran Gitlab
  • LED Matrix Interface

• Devin Alexander
  • Lead construction and design
  • PCB designer
  • Music and sound

Schedule

Parts List & Cost

Give a simple list of the cost of your project broken down by components. Do not write long stories here.

Design & Implementation

The design section can go over your hardware and software design. Organize this section using sub-sections that go over your design and implementation.

Hardware Design

Discuss your hardware design here. Show detailed schematics, and the interface here.

-PCB-

Hardware Interface

In this section, you can describe how your hardware communicates, such as which BUSes used. You can discuss your driver implementation here, such that the Software Design section is isolated to talk about high level workings rather than inner working of your project.

-LED Matrix-

-Sj2 Main to Sj2 Music-

-Music and Sound-

Software Design

Show your software design. For example, if you are designing an MP3 Player, show the tasks that you are using, and what they are doing at a high level. Do not show the details of the code. For example, do not show exact code, but you may show psuedocode and fragments of code. Keep in mind that you are showing DESIGN of your software, not the inner workings of it.

-Core Game Design-

-Game Controller State Machine-

-AI logic-

Implementation

This section includes implementation, but again, not the details, just the high level. For example, you can list the steps it takes to communicate over a sensor, or the steps needed to write a page of memory onto SPI Flash. You can include sub-sections for each of your component implementation.

Testing & Technical Challenges

Describe the challenges of your project. What advise would you give yourself or someone else if your project can be started from scratch again? Make a smooth transition to testing section and described what it took to test your project.

Include sub-sections that list out a problem and solution, such as:

Main Suggestions

Make sure you write modular code. Keep functions short and simple to start. The most used function in our project was the function to write to the 64x64 array that represented our display: led_display__draw_pixel. With this simple interface between the LED matrix and the rest of the code allowed for other functions to be written to take care of drawing images of different sizes easily.

Keeping code simple and using a naming convention that called for a description of what the function was doing allowed for rapid development with little to no debugging required.

AI

Figuring out the logic for a computer opponent in a game such as ours is a difficult task. To figure out how to optimize a bot, you must figure out various strategies the computer should employ and allow the bot to have as much or more knowledge of the game state as a human would have while playing. For our purposes, the simplest of computer difficulties basically plays without knowledge of the opponent's actions. This results in a very easy to trap opponent. Once we added in more knowledge for the AI, a viscous attack strategy was able to be formulated and the bot then took on the elements of a state machine. The initial part of the attack involved getting to the opposite bottom corner as fast as possible, going right down the middle of the screen making humanly impossible turns. Once the bot reached a close enough location to the other player, it would then decide (almost randomly, the algorithm is a bit complex) to either:

Go the section of the screen the other player was not in and play a survival game, one a human is likely to lose.
Or join the player in the section and attempt to survive.

The original intention was to force the bot to take the first option every time, but due the suggestion algorithm not responding exactly as intended, the bot can do either option listed previously. This bug actually made the experience more enjoyable and gave some variance to the bot's play style. The main take away from this section should be that not every not fatal bug can actually be a benefit to a gaming experince.

Conclusion

Conclude your project here. You can recap your testing and problems. You should address the "so what" part here to indicate what you ultimately learnt from this project. How has this project increased your knowledge?

Project Video

Upload a video of your project and post the link here.

Project Source Code

• Space Rage Main Board Link

References

Acknowledgement

Any acknowledgement that you may wish to provide can be included here.

References Used

List any references used in project.

Appendix

You can list the references you used.