DuelTank

Duel Tanks

Two-player real-time tank battle — ECE319H Spring 2026

Check out more of my work at sathvikyechuri.com

Demo

📺 Video coming soon

Screenshots

Overview

Duel Tanks is a real-time two-player artillery game built completely from scratch on the MSPM0G3507 microcontroller. Two players face off on separate boards connected by a UART link — shells fired off one screen physically cross over to the opponent's screen, with full parabolic physics preserved across the wire.

Everything — the graphics engine, sprite system, physics engine, UART protocol, sound system, and game state machine — was written from scratch in C++. No game engine, no external libraries.

Placed 3rd in the ECE319H Spring 2026 in-class competition.

How It Works

Each board runs the same firmware with a PLAYER_ID flag determining which side the player starts on. Missiles exit one screen, get encoded into a 5-byte UART packet, and spawn on the opponent's screen with matching velocity — making it feel like a single continuous battlefield split across two displays.

Board 1 (left)          Board 2 (right)
┌──────────────┐        ┌──────────────┐
│   🎯   >>>   │──UART──│   >>> 💥     │
│  [Tank]      │        │       [Tank] │
└──────────────┘        └──────────────┘
     PA8 TX ──────────────► PA22 RX
     PA22 RX ◄────────────── PA8 TX
     GND ◄──────────────────► GND

Features

• Parabolic missile physics — fixed-point arithmetic, gravity simulation, arc trajectory
• Cross-screen projectiles — missiles exit your screen and appear on the opponent's via UART
• City background — night skyline with building silhouettes and window lighting
• Hilly terrain — multi-sine generated terrain profile, tanks ride the hills
• 3 playable tanks with unique abilities:
  • 🔵 Brawler — Double Shot (fires two missiles spread ±5°)
  • 🟢 Phantom — Speed Boost (2× movement speed for 1.5 sec)
  • 🔴 Artillery — Ricochet (next shot bounces off terrain)
• Full game flow — splash → language select → rules → tank select → battle ready handshake → countdown → gameplay → end screen
• 2-minute match timer — compare lives at time's up for winner
• English / Spanish language support
• Sound effects — shoot, explosion, incoming warning, victory, defeat, and more

Hardware

Pin Map

Software Architecture

main5.cpp
└── Game_Update()          ← called every 33ms (30Hz)
    ├── Switch_Tick()      ← edge detection for all 4 buttons
    ├── State machine      ← SPLASH → LANGUAGE → RULES → TANK_SELECT
    │                         → WAITING → COUNTDOWN → GAMEPLAY → END
    ├── Physics engine     ← fixed-point parabolic missile simulation
    ├── Sprite renderer    ← transparent pixel-by-pixel draw, dirty-rect erase
    ├── GameUART           ← 5-byte packets with 0xAA 0x55 sync header
    └── Sound engine       ← SysTick ISR at 11025Hz → R2R DAC output

UART Packet Format

[ 0xAA ][ 0x55 ][ TYPE ][ DATA1 ][ DATA2 ]
  sync    sync    what    payload  payload

Controls

Building

Open in Code Composer Studio with the ECE319H Lab 9 starter project. Add all .cpp / .h files. Before flashing:

1. Set #define PLAYER_ID 1 in Game.h for the left board
2. Set #define PLAYER_ID 2 in Game.h for the right board
3. Connect boards: PA8→PA22, PA22→PA8, GND→GND

License

Built for ECE319H at UT Austin. All game logic, physics, graphics, and UART protocol written from scratch.