Scoot Pooch was my first arcade game, and it was designed from the start to be an arcade game, with the experience designed around the hardware.
Conceived with the original premise of “A game you play with your butt,” Scoot Pooch evolved from a strange hacked-apart rowing machine into a system of trackballs representing a dog’s forepaws, allowing you to pull your dog along the carpet, while foot pedals correspond to the back paws, allowing you to jump.
The objective of the game is effectively a race, where two dogs compete to get from one end of a house to the other in a limited amount of time, destroying furniture, appliances, and decorations along the way.
Game was written in Python using pygame
The use of four trackballs proved problematic, as most hardware interfaces for trackballs attempt to treat them collectively as one mouse cursor. This required setting up a custom driver to override this behavior and treat each trackball as a raw USB device, and read the serial data from each of the four devices, which is a relatively slow process coming from a slow programming language.
On top of that, Microsoft overhauled the 2d graphics drivers starting in Windows 8, which drops the framerate significantly, requiring the physical installation to run on a Windows 7 box.
In addition, there are two Arduinos (technically they’re Teensys) inside the installation. One receives serial data from the game to drive the 10 sets of lights, one delivers serial data to the game from the foot pedals and select buttons.
The game had its first showing at MAGFest 2018, and returned for MAGFest 2019. There are plans to add random level generation and other features as development continues.
Game, Design, Graphics, electronics, etc by Kyle Magocs
Music by Matt Waggett
Title screen lovingly crafted by Dylan Gallagher
Links:
Scoot Pooch on GitHub
Scoot Pooch at MAGFest 2018
Woman with service dog playing game about dogs
NORT wins!
Me and my baby
It’s kind of huge and takes up a lot of space
MADE FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH OPEN SOURCE GAMES CODING COMPETITION 2012
EACH TEAM WAS GIVEN THREE THEMES FROM A HAT AND HAD TO INCORPORATE AT LEAST TWO-
OUR THEMES WERE “ROTISSERIE” “BEANS” WHICH WE INCORPORATED, AND A THIRD THEME I’VE FORGOTTEN
All artwork was drawn by me during the competition, music was pulled from Freesound and similar websites
Collaboration with Zach Reinhardt and George Kontogiannis
Links:
Made for the University of Pittsburgh Open Source Games Coding Competition 2011
Each team was given three themes from a hat and had to incorporate at least two-
Our themes were “Sand” “Antigravity” and “Scotland”— we ended up using all three
Sprites were pulled and edited from A Link to the Past, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and Super Metroid
Collaboration with Zach Reinhardt
Links:
