Projects
PARCADE
STM32
Raspberry Pi
Twitch Plays Tamagotchi
Arduino
Node.js
About Me
Thomas Gauthier-Caron is a programmer interested in playful interaction. Thomas’ works defies the belief that computers are just ones and zeros. While it’s true that they are at their
core, they become so much more when you introduce one key variable : people. Computers then become a way to play, to think, to form bonds with each other. This is why a lot of Thomas’ projects features not just human-computer interaction,
but human-human interaction. Be it in a multiplayer screen based game, or a game of
Pong played with seesaws. With a formation in both Computer Science and Computation Arts at Concordia University, Thomas is well positioned to craft powerful computer interactions that can surprise people and subvert expectations.
Skills
-
Programming
Languages- Javascript
- C#
- C++
- C
- Python
- Java
- PHP
- Lua
- Regex
- Swift
-
Web
- HTML5/CSS3
- WebGL
- AngularJS
- Node.js
- MongoDB
- Wordpress
- Jekyll
-
Game Dev
- Unity
- HTML5
- SDL
- Unreal Engine
- Kinect
- OpenGL
-
Multimedia
- Processing
- TouchDesigner
- openFrameworks
-
Platforms
- Android
- Linux
- Windows
- iOS
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Electronics
- Arduino
- Raspberry Pi
- Particle
- ARM
PENTAGOD
2016. Game. Personal work.
PENTAGOD is a battle arena game inspired by dodgeball and featuring PONG physics. In this fantasy world inhabited by 2D shapes, the only being who is not a square, the Pentagod, organizes a battle to death among the poor square villagers of his kingdom. He takes great pleasure at watching the squares being slayed by a high velocity ball that gets thrown around in the arena. The only way to survive the battle is to perfect your jumping and aiming skills. Hit the ball towards you enemies when it's white, dodge it when it's not your color. May the winner live, hopefully. I did all the programming in this project, including player selection menus. This is a collaborative project.
Technologies
Unity
- Unity UI System
- Navigation
- Pause menu
- Character selection screen
- Map and game mode selection screen
- Gamepad input (using Rewired asset)
- Sprite based animation
- Unity Audio Mixer
- 2D platformer physics
- Game feel
Twitch Plays Tamagotchi
2015. Installation. Course work.
Twitch Plays Tamagotchi is a project Inspired from Twitch Plays Pokémon in which Twitch users can collaboratively control a Tamagotchi. It uses a real physical tamagotchi and not an emulator. I wanted originally to have little motors pressing the buttons, but I found a robotic finger that looked quite nice and I decided to use that instead. But when I received my Tamagotchi I realized the buttons were way too small so I used bigger buttons, whose inputs would be redirected to the Tamagotchi. The Twitch stream ran for a little more than a week and got over 50 000 views and was featured in multiple popular news websites.
Technologies
Arduino
Node.js
Press
PARCADE
2015. Installation game. Personal work. Collaborative.
PARCADE is a transposition of the classic game PONG onto the cityscape. Instead of controlling the game with the traditional PONG controllers, players control the game with seesaws! Two seesaws are placed in front of a projection of the game and control the two paddles, the position of each paddle is mapped to the angle of the seesaws. The two player game is then transformed into a four player game, 2 vs 2. To win, players have no choice but to cooperate. This a collaborative project made with my brother, he designed the seesaws and did all the hardware. I programmed both the pong game and the microcontrollers in the seesaws.
Technologies
Raspberry Pi
STM32 f3
Prototyping
After a couple minutes of brainstorming we had an idea : what if you could play PONG with seesaws? We needed to know, so I started coding something quickly and the next day we were in the park with a smartphone and some Duct tape! Using the accelerometers
in a smartphone and a wifi hotspot, we could send the seesaw angle to a game of pong running on a laptop.
Here's is a video we put together of the first prototype :
A few weeks later we started the design and construction of the seesaws in my parent's backyard.
