January 22nd, 2022

After watching teaching techs video on the topic of printing table top pieces for games on mobile screens I wanted to take it a bit further. What if instead of a single game piece sting as another layer of input to the device, what if we could use that single piece and “encode” game information into the game piece as a sort of key? Making each unit unique to the game. To simply it, How can we get the mobile device to detect a game piece as unique. As a game developer I immediately thought of using some sort of pattern to try add to a game piece to try and make it unique.

Back in college, I made an AR experience called ECHOs which used QR codes the were placed around campus for players to “scan” and have the player discover lore about a dystopian future we created. Seems like a good place to start, simply add a code to a piece and call it a day right? Nope, because I wanted to have these codes on the pieces themselves and have the device screen to distinguish between the units, that was basically impossible. QR codes have such fidelity that it would be hard to print on traditional FDM (since that’s what I had)  and not to mention, screens can’t read QR codes. So I had to make it simpler, a series of dots in a particular order that would make a unique pattern for the device to read. It took me many attempts and many hours, but during a car ride back home, it hit me, just use braille dummy. Now that I have the idea in mind, it was time to program it in Unity. 

After creating a little test scene and some simple code to display touches and their location to me on the screen, I was getting a little closer to the end goal. During testing, I realized that placing a sixth input of the screen would cancel all the other inputs on the iPhone 12 Pro Max I was using. I couldn’t figure out why, until: 

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/17606#:~:text=The%20iPhone%20supports%205%20simultaneous,nothing%20on%20a%2012th%20touch.

iPhone only supports up to 5 and iPads up to 11. Good and bad, since you would have to simplify a bit but nothing to stop about.