AdderCadabra

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  The main logo

Inspiration

Thinking about the theme of what would impress the judges most we thought that people are normally most blown away by newer takes on classic themes or classic games so we brainstormed whatever we could here.

What it does

Take snake, but bring it to the third dimension, then throw in portals spawning in through mysterious doors and you have the project! The player controls a snake in three dimensions, trying to pick up apples to gain score. Each apple picked up exponentially increases the snakes speed and increases its length until its almost impossible to fly around without running into some sort of trouble! (even with the help of portals to get around)

How we built it

AdderCadabra is built in unity 3D, using the help of blender (and a little old fashioned MS paint) for designing all of our game's objects. Additionally we used vercel, an online MIDI file editor, to create the soundtrack. We split the tasks up between our team, with Gabriel assigned to design, creating all of the art assets (both 2D and 3D) alongside the soundtrack. Erik was assigned to creation and collision detection with the apples the player needs to detect, alongside their random generation and the effects they have on the player. Thomas was assigned to making the portals for the game, a complicated technology involving clever camera tricks to allow the user to look like theyre looking right into the other side and indeed allowing them to move there. Julian was assigned to implementing the 3D renders and scenes that Gabriel created and making sure that they were properly rendered and had correct collision boxes.

Challenges we ran into

As with any hackathon there's a whole laundry list of challenges we each ran into, to list a few:

• Initially when spawning the snake, while attempting to detect collisions with its own body it would instantly die.
• When making the portals when entering them from odd angles sometimes the snake would teleport unpredictably, which was a particularly puzzling one.
• Github blocked eduroam wifi! Meaning that one of us couldnt access github for version control for the latter half of the project due to no VPN, but we still maintained accurate version control with some effort.
• Wrangling with a temperamental unity animation for hours at 3AM, learning on the job.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-We output a high quality project while all using technologies we were unfamiliar with with steep learning curves:

• Gabriel had never used blender before so its notoriously somewhat difficult nature had to be mastered within just a few hours
  • Erik and Julian had never used unity before so they had to quickly adapt and acclimatise to the new 3D environment and the challenges that came with it.
• We were able to implement a convincing implementation of portals that can be seen through using a secondary camera mirroring the player's position with relation to the portal on the other end to the one the player looks through. -We not only made a custom song for the game but made code for it to speed up as the gameplay of the game speeds up, really adding a sense of immersion that wouldnt be there otherwise.

What we learned

Each of us came away with new skills gained from the project, new technologies such as blender and unity for each of us. Additionally we each were able to learn to contribute more to a team environment as the project went on, communicating more, letting each other know what we were doing and what we needed other people to be doing in order to remain productive and powerful as a team unit.

What's next for AdderCadabra

Initially we were super eager to do face control for the game, recognising the user's face position and moving the character in a corresponding direction. However upon finding out the licensing prices for existing solutions and with the knowledge that we had only 24 hours we knew we had to leave this for the future. Additionally for the future we're looking to add a storyline to the game, with multiple levels across all sorts of environments as our protagonist snake looks to uncover the mysterious nature of the portals showing up all over the place! We'd also like to add a little bit of extra quality of life to the game by adding UI to notify the player of where the next apple spawns to smooth out the gameplay loop.

Built With

• blender
• c#
• gimp
• mspaint
• unity
• vercel