A local two-player strategy game played on one shared screen, where you summon your army by placing real cards on physical readers. Two players, three lanes each, one goal: destroy the other base.
A heavily armored warrior that charges toward the nearest enemy.
Two players, one shared screen, and six card readers. Here’s the whole loop, start to finish.
You and your opponent face each other over one horizontal screen. Each of you has three readers, one for each lane.
Place a card on a reader and it appears on the battlefield: a troop marches down that lane, or a spell goes off. No buttons, no menus.
Troops fight on their own once they're out. Push where the other side is thin and raze their base before they raze yours.
Every card you play sits on a reader we built ourselves — an Arduino per player, three NFC readers each, and a lot of soldering.
Each player has an Arduino Nano wired to three PN532 NFC readers, one per lane. It watches all three and reports the moment a card lands, moves, or lifts off.
Hand-drawn pixel-art cards, each with an NFC tag carrying a unique ID. Placing one on a reader is the entire input — that ID is what the game reads.
Written in C with Raylib. It takes the card ID over USB, looks it up in SQLite, and summons the matching troop or casts the matching spell.
The table and the readers have gone through a lot of versions — sketches, CAD, 3D prints, and a couple of dead-end PCBs. Some of that below.
Uvulites is playable but unfinished. A full match already runs end to end on the real hardware — two players, six readers, troops, spells, both resources, a winner, and a rematch without restarting the program.
A lot of the recent work has been on the readers. Early versions could quietly stop reporting cards and need an Arduino unplugged mid-game. Now each one sends a steady heartbeat and resets itself when it locks up, so a match can usually keep going.
We post progress as we go on this site, X/Twitter, our newsletter, and YouTube. Playtests are still early and local to the UCF area.
Enough that two people can sit down and play a real match today.
The parts we're actively in the middle of.
Turning the prototype readers into something that fits inside a real table.
Tuning each unit around how people actually play, not just how we play.
Final sprites, sound effects, and giving each unit something that's its own.