RocketPong: Now a Zero Button Voice Activated Game

RocketPong

I wasn’t planning on touching this one button game again, but I have one last improvement: removing the button. RocketPong is now a zero button game in which the player’s rocket thrust can be activated by yelling into the microphone. It feels… kind of right. I tried making the thrust relative to the loudness, but it felt less smooth.

I did this mainly as a proof of concept for a bigger and better future game idea. It is a game that will be controlled by voice input and hand gestures. The player yells into the microphone to recharge his or her ammo and makes shooting noises (pew! pew!) to fire. The player’s hand, closed into a gun shape, will control the crosshair on screen to target enemies. The game will probably be quite frustrating to play, but hilarious to watch other people play.

This version of RocketPong uses some code from CShadowRun in an Ubuntu Forums thread. It requires pygame 1.8 or newer and python-alsaaudio.

Download: rocketpong_voice.tar.gz

RocketPong

I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to write a quick entry for the Game Creation Society‘s One Button Game Compo.

It requires Pygame 1.8, which can be installed through a package manager on many distros, or can be downloaded from Pygame.

The game is a pong clone with gravity. The one button activates thrust on your paddle, which happens to look like a rocket. In theory, there is pixel perfect collision detection, so the angle of the ball against the curve of the rocket should matter. The opponent rocket is controlled by some really really horrible AI. The game would be infinitely more fun with two players, but I wasn’t sure if the one button rule meant per player or total…

Update: I uploaded a better version of it with more accurate collision detection and better AI. There is also a two player mode that is activated by hitting the right arrow key, which is the thrust key for the second player. This is the final version for the game competition, and very likely the last time I will touch the code.

Download:
rocketpong.tar.gz
rocketpong.zip

Tag: game

RocketPong: Now a Zero Button Voice Activated Game

RocketPong – A One Button Game