Complete These Three 'Amoung Us' Tasks in Real Life

A Short Introduction

The video game Among Us has exploded in popularity in recent months due to the pandemic and a large interest from the gaming community as a whole. It belongs to a genre of games that use social deduction to remove bad actors and thus win the game, similar to Mafia. In Among Us, a crew of four to ten players are stuck on a spaceship and must complete tasks (different minigames or puzzles) in order to win. However, there's a twist: one or two of the crewmembers are imposters and run around murdering other crew, and they win if all the other crew has been eliminated. That's why getting good at performing tasks around the ship is so vital for winning strategy.

Three Tasks to Complete

Zack Freedman over on YouTube was inspired by these fun little games and wanted to bring them to into the physical world. There are approximately 40 tasks that he could have chosen to build, and decided to go with the most infuriating ones, of course. These include Swipe Card, where a plastic ID card must be run through a scanner at just the right speed, Upload Data, in which a communications device is held against the reader for an extended period of time, and finally Start Reactor, where players must match their button presses to an ever-increasing pattern of flashing squares.

The Card Swiper

This minigame tends to upset most people who have to complete it, as the task requires the ability to repeatedly swipe a card with extreme precision.

Freedman was able to recreate this effect by using a pair of optical interrupters that detect the speed of the card by measuring the delay between the first one being activated and the second one being activated. The screen in comprised of several I2C OLED segments with a font that gives the illusion of a seven-segment display without all the extra wiring. Finally, two LEDs are mounted on the front and light up depending on if the swipe was a success. A Teensy 3.2 runs a program that begins by randomly selecting how quickly the card should be swiped, along with a bit of wiggle-room.

And just to add even more frustration to the experience, the device will reject a perfect swipe 20% of the time.

File Transfer

File Transfer is much simpler than some other tasks, as all one has to do is hold up a little tablet to a wireless transfer pad for a certain amount of time.

Freedman had a couple of options for this. He could have used Bluetooth or WiFI, but they can act over large distances, so NFC was chosen instead because it requires the devices to be within 2cm of each other. The "tablet" is just a fancy, 3D-printed phone holder that contains an Android device running a custom app. It continuously sniffs for the NFC tag embedded in the receiver pad, and plays a little uploading animation until the task is completed.

Mid-Reactor Simon Challenge

The final task Freedman chose to make was the Start Reactor minigame. It is basically Simon, where at first, a single rectangle lights up in a certain location, and the player presses the corresponding button.

There are five button presses that must be completed, and they are randomly ordered each time. A single mistake ends the task and forces the player to start over, so being attentive is very important.

This task actually consists of two separate devices: a screen for displaying the rectangles, and a matrix of buttons for the player to press.

A Raspberry Pi 3 controls the 3.5" TFT display and uses Pygame to draw shapes to the screen. The accompanying button panel is a 3x3 matrix of mechanical keyswitches, along with a buzzer and a few LEDs, that uses another Teensy 3.2 to send button presses to the Raspberry Pi.

Final Thoughts

This project is a great look at how some hardware and 3D-printed parts can come together and recreate fun bits of a video game in real life. It will be interesting to see what else Freedman can create from Among Us in the future.