Process

Joseph Cybul and Richard Lourie

Taco is a game played in Brazil. The goal is to throw a ball and knock over a bottle, the other team tries to hit the ball away. It is a very casual street game, that is non-competitive. We created a video game played between two people. The game captures many aspects of Taco that we found interesting. Wii sports was our main precedent, we liked how it allowed the player to interact by moving their body. Another precedent was Flick Home Run, a phone game in which you swipe away balls coming towards you. We liked how you can play it on a phone, which gives it that pick up and play feel and also the game play was very similar to ours. In our game, two players play against each other, one controls the ball with an accelerometer and one controls a plank of wood and tries to knock the ball away before it hits the bottle. In our first iteration one player would make a series of movements with an accelerometer and then the other player would try and click on the ball before the time runs out. Then it goes to the mini game where both players would try to score points by tapping the keys quickly. After some thought we decided to not put in the minigame for our final because it was not interesting. We also decided to make it so that the two people would play simultaneously to make the game faster. We used an accelerometer and an arduino for our project. The accelerometer connects to the arduino which connects to the computer which runs a program that allows processing to read the accelerometer. Our game has a few different parts: First, it starts off on a title screen which has a button to start the game, then, we have a how to play screen where the player can read the rules, after that,we have a choose teams screen which determines which player is the ball and which is the stick, then, it gets to the actual game, finally there is a screen which shows who is the winner and has a restart button. If we had more time for this project, we would add a mini game again but try to make it more fun.