Tap, Tap, Love - an interactive compatibility game

Arduino / game design

Languages

C++

Javascript

Tools

Figma

Arduino IDE

TinkerCad

Cura

Physical

3D Printing

Arduino

Skills

Vibe Coding

Prototyping

Game Design

PROBLEM

When you’re meeting someone for the first time, it’s hard to break the ice.

Connecting with people in a social setting can be tough. It’s difficult to strike up conversation, and when you finally manage to, there’s this urgency to keep it going and try to find common ground with the other person. As a team, we wanted to tackle this social pressure by creating a low-stakes game that diffuses the tension in that initial stage when two people are still getting to know one another.

SOLUTION

Introducing... Tap, Tap, Love, an interactive compatibility game.

More coming soon!

The long, long process…

Figuring Out Wiring

To set up the main function of our game, we focused first on connecting 2 touch sensors with the LED lights. Then, we explored displaying game questions on an LCD sensor. Due to limited resources, we assigned 1 touch sensor and 2 LED lights (1 red and 1 white) to each player; 1 tap would trigger the red light, indicating the 1st answer, and 2 consecutive taps would trigger the white light, signaling the 2nd answer.

Initial TinkerCad diagram
Connecting touch sensors and LED lights
"chocolate or vanilla" on LCD sensor

Making the Physical Components of the Game

After wiring, we moved on to creating the physical parts of the game, which included a heart box that would display a rose at the end of the game. We ended up 3D printing a rose, a heart box, and a servo motor extender, which would be used to open the lid of box to reveal the rose when players "win" the game.

To save time and materials when 3D printing, we created a smaller prototype of the heart box at first to get an idea of the measurements and adjusted them accordingly on TinkerCad, where we also inserted a hole to put the wires for the servo motor in and hide later on.

Demo day

Demoing with real players!

We had the opportunity to showcase our project during a school-wide Demo Day and had real users playing our game. This not only allowed us to get feedback in real time, but also witness first hand sparks flying… and occasionally, none at all.