Soft Heads: Custom-Avatar Arcade Brawler

Game Engine & Core Mechanics

Soft Heads is built in Python + Pygame for:

• The game loop
• Physics, collisions, and character movement
• Sprite handling and combat logic

The core mechanic is a “1 vs 100000” style brawler, where one oversized character fights off 300+ smaller enemies at once.

My Contributions — Custom Avatar Pipeline

I was primarily responsible for the character selection and custom avatar system, including:

• Allowing players to upload an image or take a webcam photo
• Implementing the OpenCV face-cropping tool using a circular guide
• Saving automatically processed sprites into
  • assets/characters (original images)
  • assets/characters_cropped (clean circular portraits)
• Dynamically updating the selectable roster so new faces can be used as:
  • The player character
  • Enemy swarms
• Integrating character selection logic with in game sprite loading
• Refining the character select UI for clarity and responsiveness
• Debugging cross platform issues with webcams, file paths, and OpenCV on Windows

This pipeline is the feature most players interacted with and the one most responsible for the game’s fun factor.

Additional Implementation Work

• Helped design the overall UI flow
• Tested motion, controls, and enemy behavior
• Worked on the interaction between custom avatars and gameplay sprites
• Assisted with GitHub repo structure and installation instructions

The final game lets players launch it on Windows or macOS, choose from seven default characters or create their own avatar, and instantly jump into a frantic survival fight against hundreds of enemies.

Playtesting showed that the “your face in the game” feature was the biggest draw players spent time trying different selfies, swapping faces with friends, and watching their own images charge at them as enemies.

We documented installation, dependencies, and troubleshooting on a public website so classmates and others can easily download, clone, and run the game.

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Website for game: https://bookish-adventure-nrv5e9e.pages.github.io/

GitHub link: https://github.com/olincollege/soft-heads