16 June 2008

pyWuzzler for S60
Fun motion controlled table soccer game!

Of all the un-important things in the World, Football is probably the most important. Austria maybe isn't a football nation but is currently one of the host countries of the Euro 2008, the UEFA European Football Championship. Naturally, soccer is one of the biggest topics in Austria nowadays, even though their chances of winning the tournament are, well, not so high.

Germany are heavy favorites to beat Austria in Vienna tonight but from other hand Austria know they have nothing to lose and therefore everything is possible tonight! A precious point against Poland gives them the chance to eliminate Germany at the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna tonight in what would amount to their proudest moment in 30 years.

To compensate possible disappointment with football tonight, Benjamin Gmeiner and Yen-Chia Lin, two students of the Mobile Computing department of the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria), have developed a new application called "pyWuzzler".

In short, it's a table soccer game for accelerometer enabled S60 phones, which is motion controlled of course. After all, Austria won the world championship in table soccer in the year 2006, something that won't happen too soon for traditional soccer.

As it would be difficult to squeeze the whole soccer table into the small display, the game concentrates on the head-to-head match of the two attacking players against the goalkeeper.

You control the players of the attacking row, the goalkeeper is controlled by an AI to make it more difficult to score a goal. The main objective of the game is to score as many goals as possible in two minutes.

The main feature of the game is the use of the accelerometer of the phone to control the attacking players. Attacking players (red) can be moved through a sidewise change of the inclination of the mobile phone. A shot can be triggered by turning the phone. The goalkeeper (blue) is controlled by an artificial intelligence to prevent the player from scoring too easily.

In addition, realistic ball physics were integrated. Therefore, the ball will bounce off objects such as the wall, players and the goalkeeper. The speed of the ball will be reduced through bouncing off objects and the ball friction. The ball position will be reset once the ball speed falls below a certain threshold or rolls back behind the attacking players.

At the beginning, the ball physics are simplified. The ball can only be moved sidewise to make it easier for the player to pass the ball between the attacking players. Through this mechanism, the player won't lose the ball so easily. The ball will move in all directions and bounce off other objects after a shoot is performed.

The game was developed as a prototype concept for the course "Interaction Technology", so there might be a few bugs and performance problems. It is available for the S60 3.x platform with Python installed. The game will only work on S60 3rd Ed. devices with integrated accelerometer (tested with the Nokia N95).

Note: pyWuzzler has to be installed on the same drive as PyS60 (C: for internal memory or E: for external memory) – otherwise the game won't start! It is highly recommended to deactivate automatic screen rotation.