Picnic Defender

Picnic Defender used to be on display in the hallways of the GLR where I studied. This was my year 2 project, working together with two other students, we attempted to create something ambitious.

The goal was to defend your food basket from endless waves of ants, the only way to defeat these ants is to flatten them by physically stomping on them with your feet.

To make this possible we made use of two projectors and an Xbox One Kinect. The projectors projected the game we had developed in Unity on the floor, and the Kinect was used for detecting players. The most significant challenge was getting the projectors and Kinect lined up!

Finally, my team member, Bas Rietkerk had developed a website that kept track of all escaped and flattened ants through the use of MySQL. Even crazier, he developed a mobile app that had the ability to alter the type of game mode and ants that spawned.

Overall, a cool, unique experience.

Responsibilities

• Developing the core game loop
  • Ants spawning/Ants move to basket behavior
  • Ants flatten behavior
• Implementing Kinect features
  • Researching examples & docs of the Kinect SDK
  • Support multiple players (discovered limitations, e.g, limit on the amount of players the Kinect can detect)
  • Research on how to use the Kinect functionalities in Unity
• Solving problems!