Slosh - Minimalistic dungeon crawler 🚦🕹️

Have a look at the following twitter thread to get an idea what this is about.

#staycation simply rocks! 🤓🎉 building a minimalistic game played with the red clicky joystick on an RGB LED strip. pic.twitter.com/gERPBq4jbG

— Lars Michelsen (@LarsMichelsen) August 24, 2021

Hardware

The minimalistic playground is a 1 RGB LED strip while the game is controlled with a clicky arcade joystick.

I used the following components to build the game:

• Arduino Mega
• 4 concatenated 144 per meter WS2128B strips (removed plugs, soldered together)
• 1 arcade joystick to control the player
• 1 speaker from broken headphones (an old PC speaker will also work)
• 5V, 3A power supply (not enough to power on all LEDs at full brightness. But that is not needed at the moment anyway.)

Software

The implementation of the game was made with a strip emulator I first built. Thats why we basically have two applications:

• The emulator (cmake project in emulator directory)
• The Arduino application (PlatformIO project in board directory) which is built to run on the Arduino Mega.

The actual game is implemented in common directory and shared across both applications.

The development environment was so far (but should not be limited to that):

• Ubuntu 20.04
• Clang 10, cmake for the emulator
• PlatformIO 5.1.1 for the board

Build the emulator

First install the prerequisites (on Ubuntu):

sudo apt install cmake libsdl2-dev g++
pip3 install -U platformio

You can then build the emulator like this:

git clone https://github.com/LarsMichelsen/slosh.git
cd slosh/emulator
cmake .
make
./emulator

Emulator controls

When using the emulator, you use the keyboard for controls:

Key	Action
W	Move up
S	Move down
SPACE	Attack
L	Skip level

Board controls

You use the vertical axis for moving up and down the LED strip and the horizontal axis for triggering the attack.

Build the board firmware

This project uses platformio instead of the Arduino IDE for building the board firmware. You should have the platformio command available in your PATH. Then you should be able to build and upload it with the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/LarsMichelsen/slosh.git
cd slosh/board
./upload

There is also a helper script ./deploy-loop which continuously runs ./upload, then ./serial. Once you hit CTRL+C while serial is running, the script starts over with a new build.

Wiring

The power supply + is connected to the Arduino VIN and the LED VIN. The board is wired like this:

PIN	Connected
2	Joystick up
3	Joystick down
4	Joystick attack 1
5	Joystick attack 2
6	LED data
7	Skip level
11	Speaker (as required by ToneAC)
12	Speaker

License

It's the GPLv3. See LICENSE file.

Thanks

This project was inspired by Robin Baumgarten's Line Wobbler and Twang. Thanks for the inspiration! ✨