Games and Examples

The Video Game Shield comes with a few example games and demos. At this time, the examples include:

• A version of Tetris, a puzzle game featuring tetraminos
• A two player Pong game
• A two player snake game
• A two player tic-tac-toe game
• Conway’s Game of Life
• A data collector and plotter
• A diagnostic and Nunchuck data displayer
• Elventure, a top-down adventure game

These can all be downloaded at our Download page.

You can see these games and demos in the video below, taken a few days before the initial release of the Video Game Shield:

This video was taken during the early development of the board.

Tetris

Myles’ Metzle, the main author of the TVOut library, ported Tetris. We added music, and another controller type.

Pong

Pong is a two player game that involves balls bouncing around and paddles hitting them to the other side. It has a long and storied history, and is a classic “Hello, World” in video game creation.

Snakes on Surfaces

Get these mathematical snakes off my mathematical plane!


Snakes on Surfaces is a two player game where each person is in control of a snake. The snake marches on, relentlessly growing and devastating everything in its path. If the snake runs into anything, the controlling player loses that round. The snakes can play on three different surfaces.

• A plane with walls, where the snakes cannot wrap around the top, bottom, left, or right side of the screen.
• A sphere, where the snakes can wrap around the right and left side of the screen but not the top and the bottom
• A torus, where the snakes can wrap around the top, bottom, left, and right sides of the screen.

Before every set, the speed is chosen from “Insanely fast” to “Snail’s Pace.”

Tic-Tac-Toe

This is a contributed game, created and submitted by Pascal Koenig. It features two player support, automatic scoring, and awesome graphics! Thanks to Pascal for submitting his cool game.

Elventure

This is a contributed game, created and submitted by trodoss, featured in this blog post. It features awesome graphics, a huge world to explore, and really great music! Many thanks to trodoss for submitting this cool game.

Conway’s Game of Life

Oh, man. This is a beaut. This is John Conway’s Game of Life, a cellular automaton, polished until you can see your face in the rounded 27″ tube of your wood grain console TV.

The Game of Life is played on a 104×64 grid, wrapped around at the edges. Without a Nunchuck, it starts at either a pattern or a random field and goes by itself.

When a Nunchuck is connected, a variety of features are enabled. The Z button can be used to pause the current run.

The C button opens a menu, where the field and settings can be manipulated. The field can be randomized, or a saved pattern can be loaded from PROGMEM. There are a variety of patterns preloaded, including a Gosper Glider Gun with a Fishhook to protect the gun from the wrapped-around stream of gliders. If you want to add your own patterns to PROGMEM, you can use our awesome converter webapp. By default, every time the field updates, there’s a little beep, and that can be toggled in the menu. There is also a Help presentation, where the rules are explained for people who need a refresher.

Data Collection

To show that a Video Game Shield can be used for other things than video games, we wrote an example sketch that takes a data point, plots it, and then shows the current value, the minimum value, the maximum value, and the running average on the television screen.

Diagnostic and Nunchuck Data Displayer

The Diagnostic Test sketch shows the data from the two Nunchucks on the screen in two forms. The joystick data is both shown in numerical and graphical form. The button data is just shown in numerical form. The sketch also sends data over the USB serial link back to the computer if there’s a cable plugged in. This sketch can be used an example and as a way to diagnose your Shield if something is wrong.

Melody Playing Example

There’s no picture for this, but it plays a very familiar tune.