by a team of four 🐻 UC Berkeley 🐻 students: Zenan, Chloe, Jin Wei, Jianzhi
Submitted to CalHacks 2021
Inspired by the combination of Star Wars features and an adorable whale riding colorful tides as the main avatar, we present to you a world where two settings— the space and the ocean— collide. Contrary to the typical usage of keys as controls in video games, we wanted to create something that allows for a fun, interactive video game experience that incorporates physical gestures as controls, hence the birth of our video game — Star Whales.
This video game serves as a fun, stress-reliever that provides users with a taste of the Xbox gaming experience, where you could activate the superpowers of the whale using hand gestures to protect it from the floating obstacles.
- ✋ Navigate your whale by the power of "force" (moving your palm up and down)
- ✊ Clench your fist to summon a lightsaber, which your whale can use to whack away debris
- 👆 Point upwards to trigger the halo shield, which protects your whale's water spout
In incorporating controls through hand gestures into the video game, we utilized Handtrack.js, a library for prototyping realtime hand-detection. On top of that, we used Planck.js, a physics engine for game development, to build the collision detector which allows us to set up the point system for the game.
We were faced with the challenges of coming up with the configurations of the obstacles and superpowers, as well as the mapping physics world coordinates to browser coordinates, but we had fun building superpowers for our adorable whale.
👨💻 Deploying the game on GitHub Pages for everyone to enjoy! Try it HERE!
💪 Getting a highscore of 420 without straining our arm muscles.
😤 Finishing a proper hackathon submission before hell week (7 midterms + 1 essay)
- Hand and gesture tracking with ML model
- Physics world simulation with Planck.js
⚡ More power ups! 🎮 Multiplayer mode!