This document summarizes the process of developing a collaborative game called "Cloyne Court - Silence and Peace in an Insane World" to promote cooperation and reduce noise levels during crowded dinner times at Cloyne Court. The team interviewed diners, brainstormed ideas, and designed a game using Raspberry Pis where players work together by passing colored leaves through a forest to earn points. User testing showed the game successfully encouraged cooperation but had technical issues around button presses and latency. The team aims to address these issues and better integrate the game with room attributes in future iterations.

1. Shannon Chu • Ryan Higgins • Jingyi Li • Nikhil Mane • Felix Trevino

6. Interviews
- Interviewed 5 people while they
waited in line for dinner
- Variable dining time
- New trends of plate place holders
- Common themes: stressful, long,
social, loud
“You’re first or you’re fucked.”
“... can’t tell where it starts and ends.”
Some choose to buy their own food just to
avoid the line.

8. Initial Brainstorm
Top 2 Ideas:
- Collaborative Music Making Keyboard
- Wrap large pianos around pillars in dining room to make music while in line
- Our visit to Morrison Hall made us realize that music practice was a rather solitary affair.
- Also since the practice rooms were small, we realized we couldn’t do much.
- Didn’t want to add noise pollution to an already noisy room
- Drawbot
- Interesting idea but hard to implement.
- We couldn’t really tie it back to the community we chose.

9. But Then..

10. Brainstorm Some More
- house pet (iguana balloon, moves to sound, either silent or spray noisy)
- sound as input around the room (lights as output?) (marquee/LCD output
images based on noise levels)
- colors around moves, playing with lights
- wearable status demarcations?
- telephone pillars
- kitchen webcam (similar to invention lab?) or conch revival
- tangible things like special utensils?
- portal poster (?)
- giant perimeter (or pillar) piano, final song activated by clapping

12. Motivation & Refinement
“Cloyne Court - Silence and peace in an insane world.”
~ Ernest Bloch, Cloyne Court guest book, 1944
● Cutting in line, using plates as placeholders –>
loss of cooperative values
● Calming, interesting, collaborative game
● Stretch goal: have room inform level generation
(noise levels, shirt colors, etc)
Inspiration

13. Design
96 individual walk frames (white, red, yellow, blue, orange, green, violet, black)

14. Design
36 individual eating frames

15. Design
6 color leaves, 3 different branch tiles
ambient background graphic and relaxing forest sounds

16. Technical details
● 3 Raspberry Pis
● Dinner inspired controller
design (originally wanted to
mount to pillars)
● Node.js & Socket.io for
communication, deployed on
Heroku
● Game coded with melon.js

17. Challenges
- A lot!
- Melon.js and Node.js conflicting build
libraries (a fresh issue on Github!)
- Debugging Raspberry Pi without a working
HDMI.
- Raspberry Pi and WiFi stability issues.
- Small buttons easy to accidentally trigger,
hard mapping to big surface
- Random hardware malfunctioning, harder to
debug than software
We feel like the first attempt at a walk cycle...

18. User Testing

19. User Testing
● Super loud! Opposite of
anticipated relaxing
effect
● But super cooperative!
● Controllers passed
around a lot; many
wanted to try
● More challenging to
score than we expected

20. Feedback
- The buttons are hard to press. Users couldn’
t tell if they should long press or press it
multiple times.
- The game is hard to play when you need to
coordinate with others. This actually makes
it more interesting and engaging.
- Latency is confusing and frustrating.
- Focusing on next leaf, not the current one
you’re passing, is confusing.
- “Fantastic!”
- “We got the high score!
We got the high score!”
- “Definitely can see this
becoming a thing.”
- Nice integration of
kitchen bowls.
- Definitely excited for
the next dinner
Pros Deltas

21. Future work
- Random level generation based on room
attributes (nosier room = harder levels, or
leaf colors mapped to shirt colors)
- Revisit controller design & form factors
- Different feedback methods besides color
change (music, walking speed)
- Use game as a talking point to leverage
Cloyne policy changes!

23. Demo!