ITTY BITTY KITTY RUN!

Itty Bitty Kitty RUN! is a competitive two-player arcade platformer game where you compete for possession of the cat's body. You, as either the blue or the pink spirit, will charge your spirit energy to knock your opponent out of the cat to take possesion. While in possesion you will traverse the level and platform your way through, by running or jumping on a set of pressure pads. You’ll get points by collecting cat kibbles, but be wary, your opponent could always snatch those points up when they take over control. So keep your eye on their energy meter and strike before they have a chance!

I worked as the sole programmer for this project. I was also responsible for connecting up all input and prototyped and created the technical design for the pressure pads.

Spinning the white ball in the middle charges the spirit energy of whomever is not currently possessing the cat.

When you’ve taken control of the cat you run on the pressure plates to run in game. You can also jump!

We knew early during development that we wanted to have pressure pads that would allow the user to move the character forward by running in real life. Our first idea was to strap a mechanism to the bottom of the player’s feet, which would be hooked up through a Bluetooth pack on the person's back. Soon enough, we realized that this would be a logistical nightmare. First off, the Bluetooth packs would need to be charged regularly throughout the showcase and would need to be hooked up with cables to the input on the pads. With the amount of people we expected to cycle through our booth and the strain that the cables would endure due to constant movement, there was no way to ensure that they would hold up for more than a few plays. With this realization, we decided that a more sustainable approach would be to have these as stationary pads on the floor instead.

With this, I started working on a prototype. My first instinct was to dissect an old X-Box controller and check how an input is created. What I found was that the mechanism was incredibly simple. In essence, we send an ellectrical current through a wire and check for an output at the end, and if we cut the wire, we break the circuit and no output is registered. Then, we only need to build a mechanism that, when pressed, will close the circuit. After this, I bought an I-PAC control interface which allows me to connect an input to a key press on the computer. The I-PAC has 56 inputs and each bus has two slots for wires. When we put those wires together, we register an input. The first prototype consisted of two wires with aluminum foil attached on each end which, surprisingly, worked!

Now that I had figured out the interface to the computer, we could start working on the actual design. Our team went through a bunch of iterations, but we settled on using copper tape as the conductor since it was cheap, easy to work with, and could cover a large surface to account for fitting errors, as only a part of the copper tape needed to touch at a time. This ensured that every step on the pad would register an input. To separate the copper strips from each other, we initially used sponges, but they wore down and did not hold up under constant stress. What we ended up with for the final version was a compact foam material. Although better than the sponges, they still needed to be switched out semi-regularly, but they worked well enough for our budget!

During the showcase at Gotland Games Conference, our luck took a turn for the worse. After a few hours of people constantly playing our game, the pressure pads stopped working. They kept constantly firing without input. When I was debugging the problem, I found no structural issues. The wires were still connected, and the foam was keeping the wires apart. Magically, after debugging for a few minutes, they started working again. Now, why was this? As it turns out, moisture in the air as well as sand and dust are really good conductors of electricity. The day that we were showcasing the game, it was incredibly warm outside, and since the conference was by the ocean, the moisture level in the air spiked. The solution was simply to "air out" the pads every once in a while. Who would have known!