Final prototype of Karsten Krull.

Raspberry Pi setup.

Presentation of Karsten Krull at Gamespace.

Photo: Lisa Matzner

I was responsible for the setup and maintenance of the operating system of the Raspberry Pi.

All technical elements of the toy at a glance.

While developing and testing Karsten's behavior, I worked with a flexible breadboard interface.

Before having a physical prototype I was working with a cube of paper to implement the behavior of the gyroscope.

We worked with a microphone and USB sound card to detected change of loudness in the environment. The toy reacts to loud sounds.

A teammate built the teeth with an LED and a button inside, which I accessed and controlled for a minigame. Poor Karsten has a toothache.

I constructed a LED-matrix-schematic on Fritzing and tested it on a breadboard to control more LEDs than we could access directly via pins on the Raspberry Pi.

Light sensor test-setup on a breadboard. It is later placed right between Karstens eyes to simulate light-vision.

Connecting "scales", with a touch-sensitive surface and a led beneath, to the Raspberry Pi.

Different notes of minigame ideas.

We are discussing the mechanism of the main game with help of a pen&paper prototype.

We simulate different states of Karsten, like hunger, thirst, headache and his general mood with tokens.

Photo: Lisa Matzner

I created a schematic of all sensors and interfaces connected to the raspberry pi for a teammate to create and solder our circuit boards and creating the final wiring.

I modeled the mechanism of the game in Machinations, to get a dynamic simulation of the different states, values and player interactions.

Flowchart of the intersection of player inputs by players and sensors and their influence on game states.
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Pen&Paper prototype of a first version of the the toothache minigame. Buttons affect one or two different LED and switch their state.

Notes of the final behavior of the buttons. It is a very simple mechanism, due to the fast paced nature of the game.

Transfer of the prototypes in to a breadboard setting with physical buttons and LED.

Karsten has a lot to say and thanks to a speaker in his head it's impossible to not hear his requests.

Shouting in Karsten's hearing device (a microphone in his "antenna") scares him, and stops his hiccup.

The RFID sensor sits inside the mouth of the fish. If you stuff objects with RFID-tags inside his mouth, or if a player held his player-wristband inside, they are recognized.

2 LEDs give feedback and a light sensor between his eyes detects the intensity of light nearby.

Karsten has a toothache. If you press the aching tooth it sometimes heals it, but if you aren't lucky the pain spreads to another tooth.

The scales are blinking if the are "itchy" and the player has to touch all itchy scales at once to solve this state.

Karsten recognizes if he is thrown or shaken.

Demonstrating Karsten's sense of balance at Gamespace.

Working on the code.

Flowchart of the player controller class which handles player recognition and player turns.
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Flowchart of the condition class structure and the core behavior of the different classes and child classes.
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Documentation of the led matrix class.
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I place value on writing my code in a structured way.
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For evaluation and debugging reasons I developed a logging system that writes every user input and change of game state in a text file.
The log lines are structured in a way that would make later parsing quite easy to analyze different game rounds.
► Download code sample