The Media Computing Project (Winter '22/'23): 

Instructors

For any questions about the class, please contact Adrian.

Syllabus

This year, you will work in groups on the hardware, menu system, or games of our lab's FabArcade, an open-source retro gaming arcade. The FabArcade was created by students like you ten(!) years ago in 2012, and, amazingly, is still running at our lab. We're going to catapult it into the 20's! You will be creating software within the constraints of such a fixed arcade device, which poses interesting challenges for things like performance, controls, and multiplayer support. Your goal will be to make sure that basic Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) principles are still incorporated. During the semester, you will learn:

• the role of HCI in software and especially game design;
• how to use beginner-friendly ATmega-based Arduino microcontroller boards and the Arduino IDE to program interactive behavior in embedded software (the FabArcade uses an Arduino to read and process joystick and button inputs);
• how to write fast-moving retro-style games on the Raspberry Pi.

After some quick introductions to these tools, you'll then have most of the semester to iteratively design, prototype, and test your ideas, whether it's a super-low-latency USB controller, an elegant menu system for players to select their favorite game, or a retro video game.

All Final Projects

Here are links to all the final group projects, complete with entertaining video trailers, documentation, and source code to download and try out the games on your computer. The games all chose PyGame for their implementation.

Schedule