Soupocalypse: The Last Bowl

At Hack Club Fallout in Shenzhen, my team and I built a physical fighting game where the players become the characters. Players move around a real arena, a mmWave radar tracks their position, handheld controllers send heading and action data, and a laptop turns everything into a chaotic soup-powered battle over the last bowl of authentic Chinese soup.

Pokémon battles in real life, except you are the Pokémon.

Demo

Results

Soupocalypse won 1st place (grand prize) at Fallout.

How it works

Every match combines three streams of data:

• An HLK-LD2450 mmWave radar tracks both players inside the arena.
• Two ESP32 controllers use motion and compass data to report each player’s heading and attacks over ESP-NOW.
• A Python/Pygame game engine maps that data onto the spectator display, resolves combat, and controls the tournament flow.

A downward swing fires a beam. An upward swing creates a shield bubble. Each player starts with three HP, and the first fighter to win two rounds claims the last bowl of authentic Chinese soup.

Turning plushies into controllers

The handheld controllers started life as two green plushies. Inside, an MPU6050 detects swing gestures while a magnetometer keeps track of the direction each player is facing. The controllers send their readings wirelessly to an ESP32 on the laptop, which merges them with the radar positions and forwards everything to the server over serial.

Making it feel like a game

I worked to build the full best-of-three match loop with character selection, countdowns, hit points, cooldowns, round wins, and a final victory screen. The roster features five Fallout organizers plus Aarav, each with a custom portrait, color palette, attack style, animations, sound effects, and voice lines.

My teammates worked to put together the character images, voice lines, and sound effects. The final result is a chaotic duel between the two players, which was able to attract a crowd of spectators during demos.

Team & links

Built with Arca Cengiz, Kai Pereira, and Elaine Wu during Hack Club Fallout, a seven-day hardware hackathon in Shenzhen, China.

• Source code and build instructions
• Hack Club Fallout