Balancing Act: The City Builder Game

Inspiration

We have all been told about how being sustainable is crucial for the survival of our planet and how we need to drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. However, we often manage to overlook just how dependent we are on these resources and how challenging life is without them. It is a razor's edge political leaders walk on; on one side, their citizens demand a high quality of life, but on the other side, the same citizens demand to keep pollution levels as low as humanly possible. It's a delicate dance and one that requires careful consideration and thoughtful action.

What it does

Our code is built very much like the game "Oregon Trail" where you look at menus and type in letters depending on where in the menu you want to interact with. Our code takes 3 very simple resources and requires you to build factories for those resources, and if you don't the civilian population gets mad due to a lack of resources. If you build too many factories then you end up polluting too much of the Earth and you lose the game. It is a very old fashion game but we believe it goes over our point pretty well on how tough it is to match the needs of the citizens while being sustainable.

How we built it

We first brainstormed for about an hour. Thought about the definition of sustainability and the problems with it. We then began to make a paper sheet with all the variables listed out and how the game was going to run. We then coded the game for 2 days. We then spent the last 2 days polishing the code and making it smoother.

Challenges we ran into

We were originally going to make a 2D game where you could move around with arrow keys but since we all have Macbooks we couldn't find a module that would allow our code to recognize when a key is pressed other than using the input operator. So we had to scrap that and we made our "Oregon Trail" style game. We also struggled to edit the variables inside of the function, it would show up as an incorrect definition, after a lot of trying we realized we had some global and local variables mixed up so we used the 'global' operator to convert all the variables to global and it worked.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first hackathon and we don't really have that much prior coding experience. We are really proud that we even got to finish the program in time and we had a lot of issues that we debugged together which allowed us to learn a lot.

What we learned

We learned that we should probably manage our time better for the next Hackathon as well as devote more time to GUI so we can make a better user interface. We learned how to manage variables a lot better and more efficient ways to brainstorm.