Lunatic Jump

Game Design

Project Overview

Inspired by the classic platform jumping game (doodle jump) and the trendy yelling game (chicken scream), we created this voice-controlled jumping game.

The user yells at varied frequencies to control the agent to either move left (low frequency) or right (high frequency).

We also designed a multi-player version, where the agent will move left when player 1 yells, move right when player 2 yells, and jump when they yell at the same time.

Relevant Skills: Game Design, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (via the Phaser game engine)

Project Duration: 32 hours

My Role: Game Design, Front-end development

Play it yourself (currently FireFox is the only browser that allows the voice input, but you can also use keyboard to move the agent) or Watch a video

Accomplishments

Instead of letting the players isolating themselves from their surrounding environment, this game aims to bring people yelling together to have fun. The microphone input works very well, and during the demo session the judges yelled together to play this game.

Personally, I challenged myself to take the team lead role, distributing the tasks, checking the progress, and learning Javascript on the spot.

Challenges

  • The microphone permission on chrome is not guaranteed currently, but messenger mobile app operates based on Chrome. So currently the game can’t be played on phone.
  • Facebook sets the frequency of the client and server to be 5sec each time, so we have to build our own server to host real-time Multiplayer game.

What's Next

We hope to fully implement multiplayer, as well as add shooting features and different platform types.

Because of this game, we got invited to the Global Final Facebook Hackathon at Menlo Park, where we got to see Hackathon teams from universities all over the world.

My Hackathon Team and Facebook Judges