Check Out Bonprix, an Ultra-Competitive Shopping Game
Bonprix is a game in which players must scan the correct items within 90 seconds to rack up the highest price possible.
The concept
A trip to the grocery store is fairly straightforward: gather some items into a cart, head over to the cashier, and pay with the goal of not spending too much money. However, in Niklas Roy's latest project with Kati Hyyppä, Bonprix, he flips this idea completely on its head by creating an interactive self-checkout game in which the player must achieve the highest price for their goods in the allotted amount of time. The entire display is meant to simulate a self-checkout station that one would normally find at the supermarket but also combined with an arcade machine style.
Components
Players begin the game by pressing a large central button located just below a screen that shows the item to be grabbed along with the current total. The games runs on old laptop with Linux as its operating system, and a cheap USB barcode scanner aimed at the table's surface scans the item tags. In doing so, the game can read the barcodes as a series of digits and compare them to ensure they match.
An Arduino Leonardo is responsible for reading the state of the button and sending any presses to the laptop as an emulated USB keyboard with the string "StartGame". Finally, the top of the installation is draped in a long strip of WS2812B RGB LED lights, which are controlled by an Arduino Nano.
Assembling the self-checkout area
The majority of Bonprix was built from recycled wooden pallets that not only provide a way to reuse old material, but also look like something out of a farmer's market. Above this foundation is a cardboard enclosure for the laptop and other electronics as well as the button and scanner. Lastly, the whole surface was covered in a silver checker plate foil.
Scanning items
When it is time to start playing, the game will show one of several products chosen at random along with its price. The user will then have to quickly scramble to find the item, grab the tag, and align it with the reader. The barcode scanner is always active just like at a real self-checkout, so no extra actions are necessary. On occasion, discounts will appear that lower the price of the good, so one must act fast to avoid them while balancing the need to scan as many things as possible before the time runs out.
Printing receipts
At first, the project lacked one very important feature: receipt printing. So in order to give players a small reminder of how well they performed, fellow maker Guillaume Stagnaro donated a USB thermal printer sourced from an ATM that shows up as a regular printer on the laptop.
The whole game was written in Javascript so that it could be run easily in a web browser. Thanks to the window.print() method and some clever CSS styling, the player's receipt, complete will each item and all of the discounts, can be sent to the printer once the 90 second time period has expired.
Other features
To create an even more immersive experience, Roy and Hyyppä opted to include a Bluetooth speaker that plays a little chime whenever an item has been scanned successfully. In addition to this, the previously mentioned LED strip also lights up in green near the scanner to signify the event.
For more information about the Bonprix shopping game, you can visit Roy's blog post here on his website and watch this demonstration video on YouTube.