Inspiration

Frankenstein is one of the most iconic monsters of Halloween. But he's also one of the most relatable.

Unfortunately for Frankenstein, his monstrous appearance doesn't exactly allow him to get on flights. No vacations for him :(

So, for this project, we wanted to help him get though airport security and travel to wherever he wants to go.

How?

By ripping him apart, limb-by-limb, and fitting him into a perfectly-sized shipping box!

(We actually got this idea from the movie Hotel Transylvania...)

What it does

Our game is essentially Block Blast X Frankenstein.

It's like Tetris, but instead of having falling blocks, you have a large grid and all of the blocks are available to you. These blocks are actually Frankenstein's different body parts, e.g. head, legs, brain, liver, etc. Your job is to drag and drop each of those blocks, which can be square, L-shaped, etc., into the grid. Make sure to use all of the blocks! Don't leave Frankenstein stranded in Paris without his left leg... it may take a few tries.

The levels are procedurally-generated and get harder the more you solve. You are scored on both how many blocks you can place in the correct position as well as how long it takes you to solve the puzzles.

How we built it

We wanted this game to be as accessible as possible, since Frankenstein doesn't exactly have the IQ to download games from Steam or run executables.

So, we built this game using Typescript and Vite, using Phaser 3 as the game framework, and deployed it to the web on Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we ran into was organizing the time that we had available. Hack-or-Treat is not a very long Hackathon, and we spent a lot of our initial time at the startup fair. Building an entire game from scratch in just 3 hours (yes, we were busy eating pizza...) was a bit of a challenge, but by planning out a complete roadmap of what features we wanted to implement, we were able to condense the scope into something that was more manageable. Typically, in games like these, levels are manually-created. However, for this Frankenstein game, we made a procedural engine to create virtually an infinite number of levels, saving both time and expanding gameplay possibilities. Ultimately, we were able to make something pretty darn good!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment was making the game feel polished through animations and sound effects. Given the time we had to create this project, finishing something alone was a pretty big achievement. However, we went above and beyond and made our game feel really fluid and enjoyable to play, which is something that we are very proud of.

What we learned

Throughout this hackathon and project, we learned vital lessons on the importance of time-management and roadmap planning. We were very constrained on time and only succeeded because we were able to manage our scope and communicate well with each other.