Takeover Texas

We turned UT Austin into a board game! Compete with teammates to take control of buildings. In the end, the team that controls more points wins! In addition, we have a live board to show a live view.

Comment

What it does

Takeover Texas is a week-long game across the UT campus. Players are split into Red and Blue teams, typically 5-10 players each. Players can claim buildings by spending time in them (with location tracking on their phone). The team with more total time in a building owns the building or landmark. The live board will display the areas and have an LED that indicates who owns each area.

Teams win by owning more buildings. This incentivizes players to spread out, and visit less-frequented building, since they're easier to get a foothold on. In addition, taking a picture of a member of the opposite team in a contested building lets you subtract 30 minutes from their total time, possibly taking away their lead.

Inspiration

We were initially inspired by the concept of 3D printing a cityscape using Blender done by Dhilan Nag. Additionally, when combined with the combined concept of traintrackr (https://www.traintrackr.io/product/mta3) of real-time tracking of trains using LEDs, we wanted to track our friends on a map of UT. Lastly, for the game itself, we were inspired by the YouTube series Jet Lag by Wendover Productions and adapted their game model from Jet Lag: Australia where they used territory control with wagering to just use time spent to make it simpler.

How we built it

We built it by first making a lot of the 3D print files because that would take the longest time, while in parallel building the front-end. Additionally, we built the mosquito server to communicate from the IOT devices and the LED matrix themselves. We then built the 3D print files and sent them to our printers, allowing them to move forward. After that, owntracks was used to track the location of team members and update the map binning for LED allocations. Lastly, we wrote the LED drivers and wired up the LED fairy lights under the 3d print build. Lastly, we aligned everything including the game server and ensured everything worked!

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a myriad of challenges especially in the printing department. The prior demonstrations we saw for using cityscape in blender just printed it straight up and never did any modifications. Since we wanted to put LEDs that shined through under it, we needed to add holes under each of the areas in question, which turned out to be a difficult endeavor to add holes in a mesh. We probably spent 7 hours trying out various CAD softwares or making it in blender and eventually found out we can do some cuts and hole features in Bambu Studio, our 3d printer slicing software. Additionally, because of file size, we found that it is was difficult to bring in the entire model into blender without having it crash.

Additionally, we were new to MQTT and it was a bit hard to understand how the data structures worked between devices. However, after some guidance and research, we were able to get it done effectively.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the fact that the game works in total. Additionally, we are also super proud that the blender thing was finally figured out since there was a lot involved in that process that would have probably led to us giving up in a different context. The UI looks fantastic especially with the map view. Lastly, we were excited with the prospect of making such a novel game from scratch. The idea itself was really exciting and we are proud that we got something completed.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how MQTT works and its implementation. We learned about the live updating data model feature across various devices and program nodes. We have various program nodes for LED backend and backend processing. Frontend is also just another node.

For the printing section, we learned a lot about 3D printers and how to manipulate mesh files. Albeit frustrating, we learned a lot about blosm and blender, understanding how they work. Additionally, we also learned about the map binning features in Google Earth and how we can use it for geolocation data.

What's next for Takeover Texas

We plan to expand our map and to actually record a full playthrough! Before that though, we wish to build a higher fidelity 3D print of the map for aesthetic purposes and to eventually hang it up as art.

Additionally, we wish to change the display with a button to show the location tracking of friends by color code, allowing someone to keep track of their friends/roommates on campus from a command center.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates