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
Hahah!
Awesome 🙂
ps. pyaudio seems to work quite well for audio input… and as a bonus it’s portable. pyaudio is a python wrapping portaudio. http://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/
Ah, thanks Rene. I’ll use that one when I implement the full game concept.