Somehow I was able to get through airport security with an Arduino, some loose wires, and a potentiometer. I had an hour this afternoon to mix these things together into a paddle like the ones I had for the Atari 2600.

The Arduino sends the potentiometer reading via the serial port to Unity, where it is used to position and orient the player. The mapping is a piecewise function. A low reading positions the player on its horizontal track, a high reading on its vertical. If the reading is somewhere in the middle, the player is positioned at the corner and rotated. The original Warlords did some funky sprite drawing at this corner. I didn’t feel that I needed to replicate that.

Here’s the end result, with all four players controlled by one potentiometer at the moment:

Next up: getting a ball bouncing around.

1. The games must be locally cooperative. These games are intended to be played together, with somebody right next to you.
2. The games must be controlled by custom hardware that the students build using Arduinos or Raspberry Pis.

Whenever I teach project-based courses, I always vow to work on one of my own. This semester I’m hoping to recreate a game from my childhood: Warlords, for the Atari 2600.

I spent twenty minutes the other day getting the field laid out. Each of the four players has a castle to defend, with walls protecting it from the enemy’s projectiles. The walls are up:

Small steps, oft repeated. That’s how things get made.