Weather-Dependant Gaming Console

WeatherPi

I'm planning on building a handheld RetroPie console for a friend of mine as a gift for his birthday. What I won't be telling him is that the games available for him to play will be entirely dependent on the current NOAA weather conditions in his area. I'm totally open to any thoughts, ideas, tips, etc. on the entire concept--still very much in the planning phase. Any ideas on what games to relate with what weather? Some ideas:

no games available when it's warm and sunny out (too mean?)
not-so-random sets of games for each weather condition so the games' themes are tied to the weather (no idea where to start associating a game with a particular weather condition)
better games available only during bad weather so he'll actually look a little more favorably on bad weather
What other associations could I make? hour of the day? Season? Phase of the moon? tides? I'm definitely going to let him figure out what it's connected to.
???

Ultimately, I want him to say something along these lines: "Oh sweet, it's raining--I finally get to play _____?" What do you think?

b3k

How about game rating (out of 100) matches high temperature of the day (in Farenheit)? If temperature is above 100, all games are unlocked. Too hot to go outside anyway.

I hope I don't have friends like you😈

BJRetro

How are you going to code the game list to display only certain games based on this?

WeatherPi

@BJRetro I had planned to dynamically build the gamelist.xml before load time based on certain rules. Do you think there would be problems with this? I'm basing the assumption that I can do this on this documentation which is admittedly lacking the nuts and bolts: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/EmulationStation/

mitu

@WeatherPi It would be easier to just create pre-set gamelists and then switch them around depending on your conditions. The structure of a gamelist is very simple - you can take a look at existing gamelists created by Emulationstation if you wish to manipulate the .xml though.

backstander

You might even found out what his favorite retro games are and make sure they are available on the day of his birthday every year! Another idea is to have games available on certain holidays. September 12th is National Video Game Day and maybe every game could be unlocked on that day! Unlock all the Star Wars games on May the 4th. All the "scary" games unlock on Halloween. Christmas themed games for the Christmas break! More games here. You could even have Easter themed ROM hacks like The Hunt for the Chocolate Egg or New Easter World. I think there are Pokemon hacks for just about every season.

langest

Maybe having a games of the day or games of the week could be an interesting idea. But I would find it really annoying to not be able to play whatever I wanted or pop back into my favorites whenever I feel like it.
You can try the random game feature in retropie and try limiting yourself to that game during the day. That way you can test if it is fun to not be able to finish a game before you have started on 2 other games. I would find myself trying to randomize the game again if I didn't get one I didn't want to play.
Maybe you can make a custom collection that lists some recommendations of the week. Maybe generate it based on tags on the games he has played previously.

WeatherPi

@backstander These are all great ideas! Definitely have to make all of them available for his birthday. Maybe only his wife's favorite games available on her birthday? Maybe I need a way to remotely update how this works just so I can add things as I think of them...

backstander

@WeatherPi
Maybe you could host your scripts on GitHub and hopefully the community would contributes and help you add new features.

Might be better to have short games that take a couple hours to finish unlocked for a day but maybe longer RPG style games should be unlocked for several days? I'm not sure if your friend likes to focus on RPG's to finish them or if he plays RPG's at all. Maybe RPG's only unlocked over the weekend and have a small handful of unique shorter games unlock each weekday (like different ones every weekday)?