Using Legos, an Arduino board, and a bit of tin foil, this guy makes his in-game money overnight.
F2P games offer a tricky proposition. The traditional model, instead of requiring your cash, simply demands your time to progress. The issue is that those same games often have ludicrous scaling methods, so what once took a few minutes now takes entire days to complete. At this point, most people either plunk down the cash or quit entirely. Not Uli Kilian. Instead, he built a lego robot to do his bidding, racking up in-game cash overnight.
In Kilian’s case, that game is Jurassic Park Builder. Like most FarmVille clones, it requires the player to tap on things every few minutes to get a modicum of coin. The entire contraption is built from some technic Legos and an Arduino board powered by a nearby laptop. One motor moves the iPad back and forth every few minutes, while a tin-foil covered arm comes down and taps. It’s even programmed to drag the interface over so the arm can tap on the next dinosaur. Kilian has a row of 11 dinosaurs, each generating cash every five minutes. Every morning, he wakes up to find hundreds of thousands of coins waiting to be spent.
Sure, it’s cheating, but it’s the sad kind of cheating since it’s indistinguishable from actually playing the game. Perhaps the impressive bit is that this is Kilian’s first experience building something like this. “I heard about the [Arduino] boards two weeks before and I knew I was going on holiday,” he told Wired. “I’m a 3D artist so all the stuff I do is virtual and I really wanted to do something in the real world, and I’d never done anything with micro-controllers before.”
While it may not be as impressive as the Lego robot that solves Rubik’s cubes, that’s not something that Kilian needs help with. He currently holds a Guinness World Record for solving 100 Rubik’s cubes while running the London marathon.
Source: Wired.co.uk
Published: Apr 16, 2014 03:10 pm