Rizzulator

A few of the pick-up lines available
Rizz up celebrities
See how good (or bad) your rizz really is

Inspiration

“Rizz” is one of the popular words and trends of the year. So we figured, why not make a game based around it? And while we’re at it, why don’t we make that game hilariously corny and funny. And thus, the Rizzulator was born.

What it does and how we built it

This game is a single/local multiplayer game where players try to get the highest “Rizz” score they can. The way the program works is that before the game starts it asks the players a bunch of questions (Their name, who they’re trying to 'rizz up', and the pick-up lines they have to memorize). Then, players take turns going through a facial test and a pick-up line test to earn points.

Round 1: Facial recognition

The game tracks the user’s facial expressions using MoodMe, a Unity asset. Unfortunately, the free asset of MoodMe only accounts for Shocked, Sad, and Neutral facial expressions. While we didn’t do anything too advanced, we came up with a calculation for what determines a player’s rizz. The less neutral they look, the more rizz points, and the more sad they look, they lose rizz points. From experience when a person smiles, sometimes the Shocked expression rises. We hypothesize that it’s tracking a player’s mouth opening, and since the Happy expression doesn’t exist in this model, it replaces it with Shocked. Because of this, we made it so that Shocked increases a player’s score pretty well.

Round 2: Pick-up line

Beforehand, each player got to pick or create three pick-up-lines to memorize. The original plan was to use voice recognition so that the player repeats back the lines, then we compare what they said to their original pick-up-line and award them points based on how accurate they were. Of course, we’d include a time limit so they wouldn’t take all day. However, since Unity’s Dictation Recognizer wasn’t working properly (despite having the proper syntax for this sort of thing), we decided to improvise and instead of people saying the pick-up line, we’ll have them type it out. Then, the program compares what they typed to the pick-up line they chose, and the more accurate the player is, the more "rizz points" they get.

At the end of round 2, a total score of each player’s rizz is shown.

How we built it

We built this game using Unity software and assets including MoodMe.

Challenges we ran into

A very big challenge we ran into very early on was getting the voice recognition to work and pick up our voices. We tried using Unity’s DictationRecognizer to pick up the user’s voice and convert it into text, but even though we used Unity’s documentation for it, allowed windows permissions, and tried using the mic through the headset we had and our PC, we couldn’t get it to work. Since the bitcamp mentors also couldn’t figure out why the DictationRecognizer wasn’t working, we resorted to their suggestion about using Google’s speech to text and have that in our Unity game. Unfortunately, there was an issue with that as well. Besides problem solving voice recognition, the other challenges of creating this was trying to figure out how to calculate “rizz” in a fun way that would make people laugh and also makes a little sense.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Including facial recognition in a coding project is a first time for this group. It was also an accomplishment making several people laugh with the idea of our game alone before explaining how the project would work.

What we learned

For voice recognition, Unity can be unreliable and next time we will make a back-up plan if we want to do anything involving voice.

What's next for Rizzulator

There are many ideas we could do to improve. We could figure out a solution to voice recognition so we can do our original plan. A better with facial recognition and make it so that when a player does something like biting their lip they get bonuses for “rizz”. It also would've helped if we could've tracked whether a player is happy. We also thought about doing a full body recognition so that players can do a lot of body movement and be graded on it in Round 2, but due to a time crunch and voice recognition issues, it was quickly decided that that wasn’t going to make the cut. Rizzulator can add more pictures of people, more pick-up lines, etc.