For this class, we were given an Adafruit ESP32 as our microcontroller, and the two pieces of hardware I decided to use were a button and a 2-axis joystick. For this assignment, the first part I tackled was the Arduino code. Since I've had previous experience with them in the past, I figured I should get the easiest part out of the way. I sent over the data that the ESP32 was receiving as an array to the program we were using to visualize our assignments, Processing 4.3. Utilizing a flavor of Java, I kept the visuals fairly basic (just circles). The player will be playing as a red ball, trying to avoid any other ball falling from the top of the screen. To have the player controlling the ball is what the 2-axis joystick was for—allowing the player to move in any direction they want on the screen. Moving on to adding the balls that fall down from the screen, my vision was to have the player avoid balls that are colored opposite of the background (black or white). After this, I faced a problem while coding. Initially, when the button was pressed, I wanted the background to switch from white, where you'd see only the black balls, to black, seeing only the white balls. Having to constantly press the button in order to keep track of where all the balls are to avoid them and not get hit. But my problem was that the falling balls would not appear on the button press; the black background would just cover the whole screen. Other side effects when the button was pressed were that only black balls would appear, and while the button was pressed, you become invincible to the white balls and, when unpressed, invincible to the black balls. While this wasn't how I intentionally wanted the game to play out. It still ended up being pretty fun and when you increase the spawn rate of the balls it can get pretty challenging.

Outside of factory sample

My friend Celso playing the game

How the ESP32 is wired