Byte Sized Adventures

Inspiration

Inspired by the 'Atari Breakout' easter egg in Google Images search. I always thought it was cool to make obstacles out of random pictures on the internet, and the adventure prompt made me think: "Wouldn't it be cool to look up a random city, and then do some API shenanigans to get a bunch of different aspects of the town (trivia, stats, mom & pop shops, tourist attractions) to go and attack you?"

What it does

I'll get to it later, but I didn't know how to do basically anything going in, so it's very unfinished. The only semi-functioning thing is the map. I made the background a map of the US and did some map to correlate one unit in Unity to some amount of degrees in real life coordinates. Then I used a reverse geocoding API to turn those coordinates into the city and state you're flying over. The plan was, once you picked a city to touch down in, to transition into an 'Asteroids' style arcade spaceship shooter, where you could shoot/avoid the town-themed obstacles, like a picture of the city hall. I learned after hours of trying that images like that needed to be downloaded beforehand, and that just wasn't possible with my idea, so I transitioned to text-based city facts. The new plan was that city facts would come through the API and drop on your airplane like boulders, and if you get hit, you lose half your fuel tank. Game over if you run out (you can mess around with it by pressing 1, 2, and 3). However, with the API and the backup API I used, I had trouble parsing the JSONs I got, so that ate up the remaining time I had left. Enjoy watching the coordinates move really fast, and bugged text not destroying your airplane in this wonderful game!! :(

How we built it

I used Unity and C# to build the game, did some (wrong?) math to get the real life coordinates, and used geoapify.com and apininja.com to help import the data.

Challenges we ran into

Hey! I decided to learn Unity and C# from scratch this weekend! Who knew problems would pop up? (For real though, I was very bummed about how much debugging I had to do because of that, since I was pretty excited about my idea.) The other major problem was the 9 or 10 (no exxageration) different APIs not working with me in some way, be it authorization issues, vague documentation, or JSON weirdness.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm very proud how much I've been able to learn about Unity and C# over the course of this weekend, given that I've had literally zero experience in either beforehand. I've messed around with game design in the past, but this weekend really lit the spark of passion in me that I've missed for a while. Can't be happier about how my first ever hackathon went in that regard.

What we learned

First off, I learned just to have fun. I almost did one of the sponsor challenges instead of this game just because everyone else was doing it, but after going to the First Timers Workshop I got inspired to make this weekend my own and do what makes me love coding. Another thing I learned is how important it is to work as a team in these kinds of events. While being solo is cool and you have 100% control on your project, with friends you have a way better chance putting something fun out into the world that you can be proud of, and have a blast along the way. The last thing I'd say I learned is to dream big, but focus that bigness in one or two aspects of your project so you don't get overwhelmed. Because it was my first hackathon, I wanted to cram as many cool features and mechanics into my game as possible, but looking back, I could have used one or two more brainstorming sessions to trim the fluff and get at what would make my project truly unique and fun to play.

What's next for Byte Sized Adventures

Making a comprehensive list of all the bugs, theorycrafting how all the original features I wanted could potentially be possible through advanced wizardry I don't know yet, and not learning Unity and C# at 3am.

Built With

• apininja
• c#
• geoapify
• unity
• visual-studio