Campus Chaos

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  Start Screen

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  Jump over obstacles

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  Answer trivia

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  Contains TAMU landmarks

Inspiration

As freshmen, we each experienced a significant learning curve trying to navigate campus. In a fun and engaging way, we wanted freshmen to become familiarized with the different landmarks throughout campus. We were heavily inspired by the Google Dinosaur game to create a fun solution to get familiar with some buildings. Reveille, our mascot, is a major symbol of pride at Texas A&M, so we decided to have her as our main character. In consideration of the skaters theme, we decided to have Reveille skate across campus.

What it does

The goal of the game is to avoid the oncoming obstacles, with a total of five lives. Additionally, the user has to answer trivia questions in relation to campus in order to get to class on time. 

How we built it

We referenced existing “Google Dino” and “Flappy Bird” to serve as a basis in understanding the logic behind our idea. After some research, we decided to use pygame and python.

Challenges we ran into

After completing our assigned segments of code, we had trouble integrating our code together. Although it may not have been optimal, it helped speed up the work as one person was not assigned the heavy responsibility of coding the entire game. The program is predominantly written with a sequential approach instead of defining important and repeated algorithms in functions. Therefore, the code itself is repetitive, unorganized, and hard to read at a glance. Also, it was everyone’s first time using Pygame, so there was a certain learning curve associated with learning the functions within the library.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all extremely proud of our final product and all that we have learned throughout the programming process. We experimented with pygame and are proud of learning how to continuously move objects and detecting interactions between Rev and the obstacles to detect a collision.

What we learned

Because this was our first hackathon, we definitely learned a lot. With Pygame, we learned how to display images, play sound effects, and detect events like a key press or mouse click. Additionally, we learned important lessons about coding with a team. Organizing code and leaving comments makes collaboration much easier by making the code more readable. Also, pushing and pulling code frequently is important for coding as a team because it makes merging the code easier.

What's next for Campus Chaos

Some further implementations to enhance efficiency, design, and gameplay experience include making the code more readable and expandable by adding more comments. One of the main components we failed to implement was delaying Reveille after colliding with an obstacle, which would increase the time taken to “get to class.” Additionally, we did not set a required time to get to class by, so the program runs successfully regardless of time. Another thing we didn’t have time for was displaying the final score and outputting a message on whether Rev got to class on time or was too late. Another feature could be to add a larger variety of trivia questions and increase the difficulty level. 

Built With

• pygame
• python