Arduino game · C++

Arduino Parkour

A dodge-the-walls game on a 16×2 character LCD. Walls scroll toward you; steer through the gap with a joystick. It gets faster and meaner the longer you last.

AIArduinoC++

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How it started

A video game on a screen that only shows text

I was challenged to make a video game using nothing but a 16×2 LCD, the kind of screen that shows two rows of 16 text characters. No graphics, just character cells.

The trick I came up with: the LCD's controller lets you design up to 8 custom characters of 5×8 dots, and the game uses all 8. Each one is a different combination of three things: an upper wall, a lower wall, and the ball. Three things that are each on or off make 2³ = 8 combinations, which exactly fills the 8 slots.

So every character cell can show two walls and a ball at once. That doubles the vertical resolution: two text rows become four lines of walls, and every frame is just picking the right one of the 8 characters for each of the 32 cells.

0empty

1lower wall

2upper wall

3upper wall + lower wall

4ball

5lower wall + ball

6upper wall + ball

7upper wall + lower wall + ball

The 8 custom characters, drawn from the bitmaps in parkour_game.ino. The top row of the screen only ever uses 0–3; the ball lives on the bottom row.

Try it

Play it right here

Score 0

A faithful port of the game logic from parkour_game.ino: same timings, ramp and collision rules. Arrow keys or the buttons take over from the demo.

Features

How it plays

Always survivableEach new gap spawns within a few columns of the last one, so there's always a path, just not always an easy one.
Difficulty rampWalls speed up from 1.6s to 0.5s per step, gaps shrink from 5 columns to 1, and the gap can jump farther between lines, all on the same curve.
WraparoundWalk off the left edge and you come back on the right, Pac-Man style.
Self-calibrating stickThe joystick's center is measured at boot, so it works with any stick without hardcoded thresholds.
High scoreKept across rounds until you power it off. Press the joystick to play again.

Under the hood

More under the hood

One clock, two speeds. A single timer runs at player speed, and the walls move on every 5th tick, so you always move 5× faster than the walls, even as everything speeds up.

Fair collisions. A wall line is only checked at the moment it scrolls off the bottom of the screen, not while you can still see it. You get until the very last moment to slip through.

Hardware

Wiring

Part	Arduino pin
LCD RS	`D12`
LCD E	`D11`
LCD D4	`D5`
LCD D5	`D4`
LCD D6	`D3`
LCD D7	`D2`
Joystick X	`A1`
Joystick Y	`A2 (only used as extra randomness)`
Joystick button	`D7 (INPUT_PULLUP)`

An Arduino Uno (or compatible), a 16×2 HD44780 LCD wired in 4-bit mode, and an analog joystick module. That's it.

Open parkour_game/parkour_game.ino in the Arduino IDE (it uses the built-in LiquidCrystal library) and upload.

Photos

The real thing

Screenshots coming soon.

The full source code for Arduino Parkour is on GitHub.

View on GitHub