What is next for Treehouse Toppers?

Treehouse Toppers is an innovative game created for people locked in their homes during an unexpected and hopefully unique scenario.

Treehouse Toppers does have certain limitations, as discussed in our problem statement, that for the future we would like to mitigate.

One of the biggest limitations we would like to break free of for the sake of our game is only using the spark fun kit and some other very basic household materials to create the game. In the future, one upgrade we look to make is to turn the pieces and gameboard from simple paper into plastic pieces and a cardstock board, much like how Monopoly and other board games are today. This would increase the overall quality of the final product by an extremely large amount, as there is a very big difference between folded paper and plastic. Plastic is more durable, easier to move, and less likely to get knocked off its space if someone breathes on the board, to name a few advantages.

Another thing we would like to change for the future is to change how the game is assembled. Instead of having the player piece everything together and print out parts to the game, it would be better if the player could just simply buy a box and have everything ready to go. This would mean the pieces are already there, the code is already installed on a small device, and there is no need to print stuff.

Another possible change has to deal with efficiency. One focus area would be to figure out a way to fit all of the Arduino code into a single program rather than splitting it into 2 files. If we can upgrade the storage that the Arduino uses so that the user doesn't need to load up a second game when they land on the music challenge, that would make the gameplay flow much easier. Additionally, finding a way to output the song playing to Arduino directly would simplify the complexity of our game and is something we would address too.

A final change we could make would be to the game itself. We only have 4 challenges as of now, so we could try to come up with more to do for gameplay. Additionally, we could try to add more to our original challenges, meaning more songs to guess and more fitness tasks. Another idea would be to use C++ for a different purpose. Really, we do not need a computer to control the entire gameplay, but for the project's sake, we did. We could use standard dice to replace the gameplay program, but because we were great at using C++, we could just make another challenge out of it. Using dice would also eliminate the possibility of inputting an incorrect answer into the program, so in other words humans controlling the gameplay would be much easier to work with. One last change would be to reprogram the "Hover" game so it works much more efficiently. It does not reset as of now and does not tell you if you get it wrong, so we will address these limitations for the future. 

In all, prospects look good for the future of Treehouse Toppers. There are many simple ways to improve the game that need only a small increase in technological changes. These changes can easily be made given the time and proper resources.

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