To prepare for my thesis, I've been prototyping several ideas so I can figure out what I want to work on next year. The game I came up with this week is called Pop A Squat, and is a game you play with your butt. Below, you can see what the game looks like on MIT's Scratch website.
Below, you can see some photos and videos of my classmates and professor playing! They look very silly which was definitely my main goal.
Pop A Squat is a two player game in which players must compete against each other to determine who is the best chicken! Squat to lay the most eggs, and eat your chicken feed to change your egg color to a more valuable egg. The player who gets the most points before the farmer returns (30 seconds) wins!
To make Pop A Squat, I used a Makey Makey and followed this Instructables tutorial to create stomp pads for each player to sit on and peck.
For my materials, instead of using a gluestick and foil, I used foil tape. I found it at a hardware store in Dana Point, and it was a much needed asset! It worked very well because I unfortunately did not have enough alligator clips to connect all the stomp pads to my Makey Makey. So I was able to improvise by MacGyvering some fake wires out of foil and connecting the alligator clips to those.
For anyone who's interested, the song in the background is a heavy metal cover of the chicken dance! I thought that genre would go great with folks head banging to eat chicken food.
One of my main things to consider going forward is that folks weren't comfortable head banging, which makes sense because I wouldn't want to hit my head against the table either. I originally wanted to make conductive chicken beaks for the players to wear and use instead of having two stomp pads per player. I would give this a try and definitely amp up the fabrication if I was going to take this forward.
But overall, I had a LOT of fun working on this game. That was my main design goal honestly: to make a very silly game that I could have fun working on.