mean you were trying to find all the vital elements to make a terrific Halloween-themed shooting game. Zombies? Check. gigantic “lasers”? Check. Crossbows shooting forks? We’ve got you covered. check out “Fork The Zombies“, which was set up by [piles.of.spam] to entertain the neighborhood kids this Halloween.
The game is played on a big screen, which shows a horde of angry zombies marching toward the player, who has to shoot as lots of as possible before they reach the front of the screen. The weapon supplied is a crossbow; when the activate is pulled, a fork is launched and hopefully skewers one of the ghouls. The game was written using an open-source engine called Urho3D, which takes care of all the hard-core 3D and physics work, allowing the user to focus on creating the gameplay and visuals.
To give the game a bit a lot more of a physical feel, [piles.of.spam] made an actual crossbow for the player to wield. Its manage was cut from a scrap piece of wood, using a band saw for the general shape and a CNC maker for the delicate cut-outs that hold a laser pointer, an ESP32 and a microswitch-based trigger. The laser shines onto the game screen, while the ESP32 sends out a data packet over WiFi when the activate is pulled.
The location of the shot is tracked using a creative trick: a webcam is pointed at the screen, with a red color filter in front. This way, it only sees the red laser dot moving across the screen. The resulting image is processed using the Python OpenCV library, which supplies functions to convert the relative motion of the guideline on the screen to an absolute position along the playing field.
The computing hardware consists of a pair of Jetson Nano boards, which sport quad-core ARM A57 CPUs as well as powerful graphics hardware to generate the game’s visuals. The end result is impressive, especially given the fact that all of this was created and built in just three weeks. It was apparently a terrific hit with its intended audience, as visitors queued to try their hand at shooting the hungry zombies.
Laser guidelines are an evident tool for creating shooting games: we’ve seen ones with a single round target, a set of shapes set up around you, and even metal cans that fall over and stand up again. but if you need to secure yourself in case of an actual zombie apocalypse, a slingshot that shoots knives might be a lot more useful.
