At first glance, it may look like a complicated monome for DJs, but it’s actually an electronic board game. Its purpose is to serve as a platform for team building games, although we only made one game for it.
The game is kind of like a 4-player co-op version of Tetris with hectic situations that require players to communicate efficiently (and probably also scream at each other). Each player has a board of 4×4 buttons that light up in RGB colors. These buttons are the blocks of the game. As the game progresses, a block of a random color “falls” down from the top of the board in a random column until it lands on the bottom or on top of another block. Each player is assigned a color which is the only color that player can clear and get points for. Other colors they can send to the other players who need them.
Players can only send blocks from the bottom row and they can only send to the player on their left. When a player has a column that is completely filled, his red light will turn on. If all players’ red lights are on, the game ends. As the game progresses, the time interval between each block falling shortens and at some point the game will be so fast, that the players are bound to fail. This is a high score game, so there is a reward for doing well.
Context: 2nd semester Media Technology (Medialogy) project
Finished: May, 2013
Time spent: 3 months, including research and report writing.
Total amount of programmers: 3
Software I used: Fritzing (schematics), Arduino
Hardware used:
– 1 Arduino Leonardo
– 68 RGB LEDs
– 8 8-bit serial-in/serial or parallel-out shift registers to turn on the LEDs
– 8 8-bit serial or parallel-in/serial or parallel-out shift registers to receive data from the buttons
– 16 transistors to control the LEDs
– 4 4X4 buttons
– Some circuit boards, a lot of wires, and a lot of solder
My areas:
– A bunch of soldering
– LED trigger system
– Gameplay programming
– Report writing
– Constructing and facilitating playtests
Before building the actual device, we made countless iterations of the gameplay, just by building it as a simple boardgame first. This allowed us to make a bunch of tests and ensure that the game was actually fun to play, in pre-production. This had a huge value for us, since we avoided a lot of time waste in production, because we only implemented the features that we knew worked well in the game. The biggest insecurity however was the fact that the game shifted from semi turn-based to realtime, which was difficult to simulate in pre-production.
Credits:
Mathias Klitgaard Bertelsen
Jákup Klein
Jon Aschberg
Jens Stockholm Høngaard
Casper Marc Vangsted
Mathias Meldgaard
Benjamin Nicholas Overgaard
Benjamin Overgaard´s Game Portfolio 
