Balloon Hunter was a project completed for the Silicon Programming course at the University of Cincinnati. The project was completed in a group consisting of Bin Qi, Justin Ogilby, and myself. The goal was to create a simple video game using an Altera Cyclone class FPGA in the Quartus II development environment.
The Game
Our limited time and board complexity limited our vision in designing a workable game. We decided upon a game in which a small circular "balloon" is placed on the screen. The balloon is then moved around the screen in random directions at random velocities. The user plays the game using the mouse, and the cursor is projected as a simple crosshair. The balloon is then popped by clicking on it with the mouse. When the ballon is popped, it is replaced by a smaller balloon and the process continues until the balloon is only 1 pixel in size. Somewhat surprisingly, the game turned out to be more fun than it sounds.
The Hardware
The hardware used was a standard Altera Cyclone-based development board.
Programming
Implementation and programming and of the board was done within the Quartus II environment. The game itself is an entirely hardware-based solution. No microprocessor program execution is required. The hardware behavior was defined in VHDL, and then mapped onto the FPGA using Quartus. Certain modules such as the VGA and mouse controllers were standard parts, but the utilization of these parts had to be completed manually.
Project Information
Project Files - Here you can download the entire project. You should be able to run this from the project file provided you have a compatible board. This file is about 2 MB in size.
Final Project Report - Final report on the project.
