Hacking a 3ds to add parental controls

 

The 3ds is an amazing piece of hardware. Especially if you hack it to add homebrew/emulators.

My son has been enjoying a bit of "free time" before bed, and playing with a generic "mini arcade" game system. The games are all generic knock offs, and I figured he'd love to play with my hacked 3ds which has thousands of high quality games...

The problem is, the 3ds doesn't have "screen time" controls to encourage him to put it down after X minutes so he gets some sleep. So I decided to download the source for the custom firmware I was using (https://github.com/LumaTeam/Luma3DS) and add the controls myself.

Because I wanted the parental controls to pause the game, and allow "sleep" to save his game, I had to add my code to the firmware itself. This lets me spawn a thread that is running in the background, even when a game is running to keep track of time, and screen time limits. I added the ability to call out to my website with the current game he's playing (so in the future if we want to have certain educational games count for less time, we can)

The basic logic is this: Every few seconds it sends the current game he's playing to my sever, which responds with the screen time limit. In order for this to work "offline" if we are not at home/near internet, it has a built in "default" time of 15 minutes. It then writes to a local file every second to keep track of actual screen time usage. Then if the current screen time usage is over the screen time limit, it pauses the OS, and pops up a screen telling him that his screen time is up.

It also has a hint on how to add more screen time (he's learning to read, so if he figures this out on his own, he deserves the bonus screen time) This is also a way for us to add more time if we need locally. We can add screen time via my server as well.

So far its working great, and just about ready for "prime time" (had some issues with the 3ds getting stuck in sleep mode, but I'm just about done with that.

Once I am finished with the code, I'll upload it all to GitHub so other parents can enjoy :)

Code is gross, but functional. I'll be adding more features as I need them. 
https://github.com/spiffomatic64/Luma3DS

Halloween 2023

I love making these interactive "games" for kids on Halloween. 

This year I used the "skibidi" battle from the game I just made and slapped a kinect plugin onto it. Kids LOVED it.

Plunger Game

 A little while ago, I went to a party for a 2 year old, and an older kid noticed my zelda tshirt. We started talking about games, and I mentioned that I like to make games for kids to practice using the Unreal Engine.

I asked if he could make any game in the world, what would he make. He said he'd make a plunger shooter.

This kid had no idea what type of game design I could do, so I figured I'd have fun a pull the rug out from him a few times. The first level is a simple looking cartoon 2d side scroller game, when you get to the end, you "fall through the world" into a Playstation 1 style 3rd person plunger shooter. When you get to the end of this level, you fall through again (this is a reference to the next level, which is inspired from a very popular "meme" video for kids his age named "the backrooms")

The last level is a first person plunger shooter with monkey's that throw poop at you. If you wander around, and follow the arrows on the walls, you find the boss, which is another popular meme for kids his age "skibidi toilet".

Here is the Plunger Game. (All of the assets/art are from other gamedevs, I just quick kitbashed this together in a couple days to make a kids idea reality.

HotDog Game

 We had friends come over with their kids a couple of days ago, so obviously I asked the kids for their "dream game" idea.

This was their pitch:
A hot dog eating contest, where its a guy vs a robot, and every so often a gold hotdog shows up, and if they eat it, they throw up on the robot.

Can do

Sing Hero

 A game I made for a friends daughter. She asked for a game where you play as Elsa and sing let it go. Its a mix of "guitar hero" and pong. (the more notes you miss, the lower in volume the vocal track goes. 

The notes are being read in realtime from a midi file that has just the melody, so their height and positioning is "mostly" correct (its hard to sync midi and analog when they weren't made by the same person lol)

Hero Side Runner

 A simple infinite side scroller (Similar to the TweetyRunner) But made for my son who loves metal, and super heros. 

You can pick between a bunch of his favorites, and the super heros all have the same two powers: Laser and fire blast.

Tweety Runner

 A game I made for my friends daughter, who really loves a show called "ruff ruff tweet and dave".

I found a mobile game the show made, downloaded a copy, extracted the binaries, ripped the assets, and converted to unreal. 

The game is a simple infinite side scroller, once you get 100 banana's Dave shows up and tells you he loves bananas.

Nessy Finger

 A game I made for a friends daughter who wanted to "hunt" the lock ness monster. 

The two songs in the background are her two favorites. Nessy randomly appears and you have to "press" on it to win. If you go too long and can't find nessy, a large light/beacon will show up to help you.

Jacks Hunt

Another game I made for a friends son.

He wanted a game where you could hunt in a forest. I made the deer explode into glitter to make it less violent/silly? Not sure if thats a good idea or not lol... 

I also added some of his favorite pokemon as secrets to find in the level as he wanders around.

Sonic Seeker

 This game was made for a friends son, who wanted to play as sonic and tails, playing hide and seek. If you select sonic, you find tails and vice versa. 

The billboards are dynamically populated via a google spreadsheet so the parent can add whatever images they want to the game in real-time to make the game more personalized.

His son asked to add a secret titanic you have to find, that has wall-e on it. If you find wall-e the next time you "seek" you are finding wall-e instead of sonic/tails.

The core movement is lifted from the Infinity+ engine. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjtjUrkKuMAV6HKteOK26kQ

Elsas Star Finder

Finally broke down and paid for the apple dev license, which let me start making games for all my friends kids who only have iphone/ipad devices.

Its a huge pain, its 100$ a year even if I never sell anything/publish anything on the store, and after I tried to get a refund after realizing how much of a pain it was, they refused... I hate apple...

Anyway, heres the first game I made. The request was from a destiny-friend's daughter. 

She asked for a game where Elsa had to find stars in a snowy forest. 

Vault of Candy

Made a fun interactive "game" for trick-or-treaters. (Based on a raid from destiny called "Vault of Glass".

 It requires kids to stand in certain spots (detected using a kinect v2) and if they stand there long enough, the lasers charge up, and make a big blast over to the right (where there is candy in a coffin/chest thing)

Minecraft Music

My neice has been really into minecraft, so I decided to make some cool stuff for her in a shared world that we could play together with.

This is her favorite song "old town road" being played on music notes.

Iron Man Game

 He's still in love with super heros, so I made a simple top down "tap to move" iron man game...

The enemy ai is from: https://www.raywenderlich.com/238-unreal-engine-4-tutorial-artificial-intelligence

If you tap close to iron man he does a blast.

Roblox demo I made for a friends kid

 A friends son wanted to make a rocket you could climb into and take off, so I threw a quick demo together.

Spiderman Game

He loves super heros, so I found a working POC spiderman template in unreal, and cleaned it up/optmized it to run on ue4 mobile (running on android).

Made it an infinite runner with a simple touch interface for him to play with.

Teaching during Covid

 Found a website through a friend that let people volunteer to sign up and teach courses, so I signed up to teach a few classes.

Video game development (intro and hands on)

Hacking 101

Electronics Hacking (modifying existing electronics)

Unfortunately I can't share these videos as they contain kids faces/voices and don't want to violate their privacy, so here is an intro video I made to show off how good the engine can look.

In this demo, there's a powerpoint which is getting its data live from a google spreadsheet, then when the spreadsheet is done, the screen dissolves showing the "powerpoint" was in the unreal engine the whole time.

Chainsaw game

Hes been in love with chainsaws lately for some reason, so I decided to make a physics based chainsaw game. It uses procedural mesh's so you can cut the logs any way you like and they fall based on physics.

Yoshi Game

I ripped the assets from the most recent yoshi's crafted world game and made a game for my kid. The controls are left/right jump, and if you tap yoshi it spawns a random simple object he recognized above yoshis head.

Sneaky pete game

A game where you play as a dino hiding from bunny rabbits in a town