First Project

What was Relavak Labs first project???

A hardware based game called the Flashwand. The Flashwand displays text when waived in the air. It also can display a variety of colors and patterns from a crystal ball on its end. The programming contains an adventure (RPG) game that uses the display and the single pushbutton. As you play you earn more functions for the wand until you get all of the wand’s powers, and the ability to put program the wand to say whatever phrase you wish.

I used this project as my first foray into sub $100 development systems. A PIC processor, a 64kbit EEPROM, 10 LEDs, a pushbutton switch, a tilt switch, and a resistor is pretty much the entire hardware. The most difficult part was designing the hardware to fit in a very skinny aluminum tube. I built about 10 of them (have parts for 100) but can only find one or two.

This project lead to the creation of Sensys Networks (http://www.sensysnetworks.com).

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Relavak Labs Second Project

I have been wanting to develop a game for the Nintendo Wii but it seems that Nintendo is not interested in supporting individual developers yet. So instead I looked into the Nintendo DS and found lots of “homebrew” support for development on the DS. So I bought a development system (supercard) and downloaded the devkitpro tools and started. Soon I found a couple of software packages that provided a reasonable “game engine” for my game: Box2D (physics) and uLibrary (graphics). Box2D had a port already to the DS (fixed point) by tobw.net, which I updated to the then current version of Box2D.

My first game: PinHockey, a one or two player game (one DS) that is a combination of AirHockey and Pinball. It can downloaded at http://www.relavak.com/downloads/PinHockey.zip. The select button invokes a list of option that can be changed via the touchpad.

Have fun. Check my blog at http://www.relavak.com for updates and info on other Relavak Labs projects.