Run The Bath

Run the Bath
Soap
Duck
Brush
Duck
loofahs
Boat
Shampoo
Fish
Submarine
Ring
Frog

Inspiration

We all ran the Bath Half together. Inspired by that we wanted to build something that made people laugh the moment they saw it — a game where your actual body is the controller, no gamepad required. The Bath Hackathon in Bath felt like the perfect excuse to ask: what if a rubber duck had to survive the most chaotic bathtub?

What it does

Run The Bath is an endless runner where you are the rubber duck. Stand in front of your webcam and use your real body to play — lean left and right to dodge obstacles, throw your arms up to jump. The bathtub scrolls endlessly, throwing swinging loofahs, rolling bath bombs, sliding soap bars, toothbrush walls, hot water taps, and floating shampoo bottles at you. The further you survive, the faster it gets.

How we built it

We used unity to build a 3d running game and imported hand drawn images for the duck and obstacles to dodge. For the computer vision side we used mediapipe python library which provided the pose estimation and tracking to get user's intended action to perform in the environment. On top of the library we converted the actions of the user to detect their intended movements and translated them into the game environment. We also had to develop a fast api to send the live data feed into the game with minimal lag.

Challenges we ran into

Learning to use Unity for the first time. Cross collaboration and prioritising work between teams to reduce downtime where someone is waiting for an asset or next game feature.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The controls actually feel fun. Getting a real person's body movements to translate in to game input — with no lag that breaks immersion — was harder than it sounds and we're genuinely pleased with how it plays. We're also proud of the obstacle variety: each one has a distinct behaviour and timing that keeps the chaos fresh. And the whole thing was built in a single hackathon day. We are also proud of our hand drawn assets

What we learned

We learned how to capture and use body tracking in real time and the fundamentals of how to create a game. We learned how to use CLIP Studio Pro and graphics tablet.