By Frank “Weekie” Podraza

The program was originally a small phone project for me and a few friends to play in the park. The biggest issue was that I wanted to make the program run on a standalone device. I dreamt of a large group playing the game over a large area, and needing to use phones to communicate. Hastily, I put together a Raspberry Pi running Windows 10 IOT and wrote the project in Unity. It was what I was used to at the time. It was slow, but it worked. It could only be controlled from a separate laptop. Here’s a video of that working:

There was so much I wanted to improve. I wanted it to be faster. I wanted it to be a standalone program, and not require the use of a nearby computer. I also wanted to learn another programming language, because why not? Being a game developer is great except when you only know one set of tools. Since I could easily get Python running on the Raspberry Pi, I built the game on that. It took a few days, and a lot of spaghetti code, but it works. There is a “Bomb Defuse” mode like Counter-Strike, as well as “King of the Hill” from Halo, and “Secure Area” from Rainbow Six: Siege. It also plays sounds taken from the various games.

Other improvements include:

  • A settings menu to edit timings
  • The ability to set the code for bomb defuse
  • A settings menu to edit timings
  • Changes to how bomb defuse works
    • Defusing the bomb takes time
    • Typing the wrong code locks the player out for some time
    • There’s a delete button for when you make a mistake typing in the code

Here’s one last video of the actual build of the prop. It’s janky, since I did not have access to better materials to build a case out of (i.e. metal and/or a 3d printer), I built it out of cardboard. I would love to revisit this project one day. A proper case would be really neat, and as always the code can be improved.

There are quite a few videos on the Nerd Herd Network Channel of us playing with this prop in different setups. If you want to check any of those out.