I have no idea where to ask questions related to official published games, so feel free to move this thread to somewhere more appropriate.
I tried the game Group Therapy thinking it would be a relaxing non-challenging puzzle. I was disappointed when I realized that the timer is so quick that I barely have time to process the blinks’ color (and if lucky, separate one blink) before they are changing again. The induced anxiety made me want to throw my blinks across the room.
If I want to modify the game code to make the timer closer to a minute or remove it altogether (or, if I feel really ambitious, add a timer option thing before starting the game), where would I start?
I’ve read through most of the tutorials, but have not yet coded anything beyond that.
Hello @Anaya! I am not super familiar with the code for Group Therapy, but I can tell you where I would start. You can find the official code for Group Therapy on the official Move38 GitHub page here:
Open the .ino file, then copy and paste the code into a new blank file in arduino IDE. The pre-set variables for the game are right at the top of the code file and it would seem the variable called #define PLAY_PHASE_TIME appears to be the one that you’d need to modify. It is currently set to 4000 which is approximately 4 seconds (each 1000 is about a second of game time when using a timer). To double the length of the round time you could simply change this to 8000 (approximately 8 seconds) or just set it to whatever other length you desire. I’m assuming that you have some familiarity with Arduino IDE and know how to upload code to a Blink, but if not there are some great tutorials out there on this forum under to tutorials topic. Hopefully this helps!
This is the kind of modding I’m starting out with, both to learn the dev process by tinkering with existing games, but also to make some of them a little easier to play for my daughter (3.5 yrs). She likes Wham, Speed Racer, Darkball, but they’re all too fast for her Of course she’s also content to just click the Zen blinks over and over, and I can’t blame her there
I set it for one minute, which is long enough to not only group/separate the proper pieces, but also create fun designs.
Until I got 5 introverts and 1 lonely extrovert …
I also just discovered that blink can connect via their corners, which does not register as connected in group therapy. This leads me to wonder, can blinks sense corner neighbors or other blinks that are close, but not touching? Those might allow for interesting mechanics in some games.
Communication happens through IR so close aligned blinks that are not touching might still be able to communicate. Do not count on that tough as any strong enough IR source will mess with that.
Of course she’s also content to just click the Zen blinks over and over, and I can’t blame her there