Bouncy Beagles

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Inspiration

I am still relatively new to coding. My interest stems from a lifelong passion for video games, and so that's how I became interested in coding and, more specifically, game development. I've only ever built one game before (a balloon popping game for mobile), and even something as simple as that took me one month.

What it does

Bouncy Beagles is a click-and-drag game, focused on collecting as many beagles as possible within the time limit. With "Who Let The Dogs Out" by Baha Men playing in the background, the game conveys a feeling of silly urgency. Small beagle icons bounce from surface to surface in a tightly-packed map, making it hard to catch them. The difficulty is further compounded (or not it's up to you) by a difficulty slider in the settings tab. Adjusting the beagles' speed value can cause some pretty hectic gameplay. Every player is rewarded with a summary of their statistics at the end of each round, as well as with a cute beagle picture to make up for any negative emotions brought on by the super fast and bouncy beagles.

How we built it

I built it using Unity 2D, which uses C# for the programming. I started by creating an edge collider to map out the surfaces that the beagle would collider with, and then created scripts to dictate the beagles' movement, collision detection, spawn location and spawn rate, score and a countdown timer. I also had to write scripts to allow the player to pause the game (and subsequently resume or quit), navigate between menus (main, pause, game over, settings), and finally a dedicated script to reveal a random cute beagle picture.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that I ran into include: the beagles losing momentum when colliding, detecting when a player has run out of time and bringing up the appropriate screen, complex interactions between the various menus (hiding revealing elements based on triggers).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The accomplishment I am most proud of is the resiliency that I demonstrated throughout this hackathon. I've never participated in a hackathon before, and I am pleasantly surprised with the focus I maintained on my project all weekend long.

What we learned

I learned how to manage scenes within Unity, unique Unity 2D features such as "Order in Layer" and the basics of Coroutines. I also learned to ALWAYS set UI to scale with screen size, because I realized after I finished my project that it looked wonky on other resolutions (I had to resize everything and it was not fun).

What's next for Stefan

I have already signed up for MLH's Hack or Treat 2 and Global Hack Week. On top of that, I will also be participating in ClockHacks and Hack to Educate. Programming will be a part of my future, and if this hackathon has taught me anything, it's that I will be able to achieve my goals if I continue to work with the same determination I had this weekend.

Submission

I added a link to my GitHub repository. It has all the individual scripts I created for my game. Unfortunately, the game itself is 2MB too large to upload to GitHub, so I included a link to my MEGA account where you can find the zip file for the full game.

Built With

• c#
• photopea
• unity