We're three students, and we wanted to build a game you sit at, not just one you stare at. The idea for Uvulites is simple to say and was a pain to build: two people across a table from each other, one shared screen between them, and you play your cards by physically putting them down on a reader.
This is the first devlog. We'll use these to write down what we built, why, and what broke along the way — partly to keep ourselves honest.
The first prototype
The first version was rough. A single window split into two halves, with the camera rotated for each side so each player faces their own end of the board. Cards came out of a small database, there was an energy bar that ticked back up over time, and you could spawn a unit and watch it walk forward. That was about it.
The part we actually cared about, though, was the input. We didn't want a controller or a mouse during a match. We wanted the cards to be the controller.
The moment it clicked
So we wired up an Arduino to an NFC reader — the same kind of chip that's in a contactless bus pass — and taped a tag to a printed card. Place the card on the reader, the reader reads its ID, the Arduino sends that ID to the game over USB, and the game looks it up and spawns the matching unit.
The first time a card on the table made a little guy appear on screen and start walking, that was the whole project in one moment. Everything since has been making that loop deeper.
Where it's at
It is, to be clear, a mess right now. The two halves of the board are awkwardly stitched together, almost every sprite is a placeholder, and there are only a couple of units. But the core idea works, and that was the risky part.
Next up: turning those two stitched-together halves into one real battlefield, because the seam down the middle is already causing us problems. More on that when we've survived it.