Project Elixia

Do you like music, dancing, and video games? How about all at once? With Elixea, you will now be able to do all three at the same time! By using a Microsoft Band or a MYO, you will now be able to play a game that is created on the spot with any kind of music you download! 

How to set up:

1) Connect your Microsoft Band and Sphero to the Windows Phone.

2) Select any song you want from your song list.

3) Wait until a game is generated based on the song that you selected.

4) You can begin playing!

How to play the game:

1) The different colors that light up in the Sphero indicates different movements that you must make in order to successfully get the full points.

2) Depending on the difficulty level, the the Sphero will speculate an unique array of lights. The goal of the game is the get all the movements correctly that is associated to the color that the Sphero ball lights up and achieve the highest score possible.

Progress on Week 3:

I finally got an Azure (one of the happiest moments this summer so far) account. This week, I think I finally got it to work by following the directions on http://bit.ly/1ywVXLL! Lots of work still needs to get done but I think now I got the ball rolling. I got node.js connected to Azure mobile services. Then, I got Visual Studios to connect to the same azure backend using javascript. Because, I connected Azure to my local git account (it helps you make one really easily), as long as my code compiles, I am able to run node.js via cloud and connect to my windows phone.    

I decided that unless I found a way to run node.js on Windows Phone without being wifi dependent, this is the way I’m going to run my app. Now that I had concrete proof that everything to work, it seemed like I set the framework in place and I had to begin coding my engine to generate a song file on the fly from the windows phone and be able to do it fast enough to in order to not be a hassle for the user. On Visual Studios manifest, I enabled the phone to be able to have access to the music library. Currently, I am in the middle of creating the input process for the mp3 file to create a game file that can be deleted on will which I will continue to do next week as well.

Progress on Week 4

This week was a lot better in terms of making progress. I was able to move on with making the engine for my app. Now the synchronization and the latency problem was gone for the most part, there was now the problem of how it took to generate the game. My original idea was to generate the song file before playing the game so the user would be able to play over the game file and detect the hit and misses. Even though, that would theoretically work, it would be very annoying for the user to have to wait the duration of the entire song (3-5 min) to play the game. My next idea was to generate the game while the user was playing. When the user picks the song, the engine fire up the song to frequency parser, concatenating every 1 second (instead of every the recommended 1/60 for a typical rhythm since that was too precise for this kind of platform) into an array. The game would wait 4 seconds until the user can actually play the game. As the game file is being created, the user would be playing the same time. I haven’t tested this out yet but that is actually what I’ll be finishing up hopefully today.

Project Recap:

Wow, what a journey! This was my first time developing a game to this scale and I may have overestimated the challenges and time it would take to finish it. In order to develop the game – even without the extra technologies I used like the Sphero and the MYO – I had to research each and individual different parts of the game I wanted to develop. Not only that, but there were a couple of technical challenges that the other MSPs and I faced along the way. One of the requirements was to be able to run node.js on the Windows phone. That was probably the toughest challenge because the Windows phone didn’t support it natively. In the end, I was able to run it by using Cordova and Azure’s Cloud and Mobile App services. The engine to be able to dynamic create individual games for user input songs were tough too due to synchronization and latency issues between the technologies talking to each other.

In the future, I plan on finishing my game – which is not quite completed yet. I want to implement a better UI, create a hassle free way of connecting all the devices tied together in order to play the game. Even though it is playable but I wouldn’t put it out on the Windows store just yet. I’ve learned a great deal throughout the game development but most importantly I learned that there are so many opportunities for app or game development using the Sphero. The Sphero is still fairly new to developers and I can see many apps being developed for it in the near future.

If you have any questions about this project, please contact me at taehong.min@studentpartner.com.

Follow me on twitter @taehongmin1 ! 

https://twitter.com/taehongmin1