Summary

i-kiwi-ki is a survival game built with Python and PyGame where players throw kiwis at randomly spawning enemies to earn points and survive as long as possible. The twist: the player is controlled entirely by physically tilting a handheld gyroscope controller — greater tilt in a direction adds velocity over time, mimicking inertial physics.

Controller Design

The controller uses an MPU6050 gyroscope/accelerometer module connected to an Arduino. A C++ Arduino sketch continuously reads orientation data and streams it over serial at a fixed baud rate. On the Python side, the pySerial library reads the incoming data stream and maps tilt angles to player velocity increments each game tick.

Software Architecture

• Real-time serial parsing on a dedicated thread, decoupled from the game loop
• Thread-safe data structures to pass controller state from the serial thread to the game thread without blocking
• Persistent leaderboard written to CSV; loaded and displayed on the leaderboard screen
• Calibration screen at startup to zero the gyroscope against the user's resting tilt