An Ecosystem in Your Hands

Inspiration

Being our first hackathon, we wanted to do something that focuses on the theme of the hackathon: sustainability. When people hear the word sustainability, they think of the environment. Our project focuses on showing why we need to care about protecting the environment. When people think of the environment, they think of different biomes and ecosystems that coincide with them. The one we had chosen for our project was the plains. The actual game itself is a simple text-based game, taking inspiration from elements of games like Civilization and Oregon Trail.

What it does

You are playing as Joe Bison, the leader of an African Plains Ecosystem, and have to manage your ecosystem, maintaining the balance between animals. We aim to represent the fragile balance that exists between species in food chains, and how the balance is affected by human intervention.

How we built it

We used Replit to code the game in Python. Python and the 'random' module were used, as well as Google for researching our animals in the ecosystem.

Challenges we ran into

First, we came in without a plan on what we were going to do, only knowing it was going to be related to the theme. Because of this, we had to spend time deciding what our plan was going to be and do some research before getting into the actual coding. We also had to simplify our project quite a bit, for example, we planned on having more biomes than just the forest, but that would've required more time. From there, our only issues were debugging and adjusting values for the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For our first hackathon, we managed to make a working project that we are proud of, and we feel that there's lots of room for improvement from here.

What we learned

From our first hackathon experience, we learned the value of coming in with a plan, as it could save us time that we could use to add more variety to our game.

What's next for An Ecosystem in Your Hands

Expanding the game from only having one biome, to possibly including more biomes or types of species. An example of this is the scavenger, an idea we had planned if we had more time, who would feed on only dead animals.