Adventures of Alphabet Soup

Inspiration

Now, we know that Alphabet soup is a little random, but we were inspired by the classic childhood show about the talking dog that eats Alphabet soup. We wanted to have a choose-your-own-adventure game as it is very interactive with the user and we had great ideas. Also, we were beginners and we couldn't tackle something too challenging(you can't blame us).

We also got inspiration from our favorite childhood show, Word World! Word World formed the basis of our imagination from a young age. I mean, it was a show, with animals, and they were made of letters! If that wasn't mindblowing to our young minds, I don't know what was. Regarding the superhero pathway, we all have a love for superheroes (Marvel is better), we also decided to incorporate superheroes into our game. We all have siblings and decided the Rap Battle and the Dance Battle would be a representation of sibling rivalry.

What it does

It is a choose-your-own-adventure game that is made up of several mini-games and user choices. The player is presented with options and based on their answer to these prompts, they will earn a different experience and be able to unlock different endings. Starting even from the first choice, the game splits into two different pathways and from there it continues to branch. Each minigame, if you win, displays 2-3 letters that you will use at the end of the game to unscramble and enter, similar to Wordle!

How we built it

We used Java to code our game, Adventures of Alphabet soup, and the platform we used was the Eclipse Workspace. Instead of one person coding the entire game and the other members telling what the other person should code, we decided to split up the game into four parts. This would allow everyone to code different aspects of the game, and also provide feedback to other people’s parts to make it better. We also used graphics in our game, which made the game more colorful and interesting for the user.

Challenges we ran into

Well, this was our first hackathon, and let’s just say, we didn’t know what to expect. We had a vague idea of the direction we wanted to take, but that was it. I mean, before this year, I didn’t know that people didn’t hack a program in a hackathon. Once we started coding, and got our idea planned out, we got errors. Lots of errors. Eventually we figured out compilation errors. Since we split up the game into four parts so everyone would be able to code the game, we ran into one of our biggest issues, which was being able to combine all of our parts together into one game. We thought it was going to be very easy, but since we all had duplicate variables and different classes, it was very difficult to combine all of the code together, however, we were able to figure it out by making more variables.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the overall game we created, and especially how it relates to the Wordle theme very well! We are also proud of ourselves for all coding different aspects of the game, and being able to combine all of the aspects together to create an amazing game. We were able to debug our code by ourselves when we encountered issues. We accomplished more than creating a game, because we learned and became better coders.

What we learned

We learned much about Java and one’s capabilities while using this language for games. Something new we learned was how to make animations in Java as well as taking in user input using a keyboard and mouse. We gained experience that we couldn’t have learned in a computer science class. In addition, it was stressful. We had limited time to code and execute a whole game, we knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but we all faced coding blocks (like writing block, get it?). We all had different styles of coding, and sometimes, it was hard balancing that. We knew we would learn a lot about code, but not about how much teamwork and collaboration that went into it. However, we all helped each other (the hourly walks around the main floor helped) in coding. Most importantly, however, the experience and what we learned this weekend will stay with us in future hackathons.

What's next for Adventures of Alphabet Soup

To make our game, Adventures of Alphabet Soup, more exciting, we can add more mini games and options that the user can choose from. We can also add more graphics to the mini games so that the mini games are more aesthetically pleasing to the eye and not plain.