Cellular Calamity

New innovative top-down 2D island survival game against the wrath of nature. As storms rage, and the earth gets hotter, players must adapt, endure, and outsmart the very forces of nature.

Comment

Inspiration

The idea of Cellular Calamity was inspired by themes from both Video Games and Natural Disasters. Our group decided to implement our natural disaster in an island-based game, where floods and fires are generated using the Cellular Automata algorithm inspired by Conway's Game of Life

What it does

Cellular Calamity is a simulation game that takes place on a stranded island. The player must survive as long as they can against unpredictable floods and heat waves, and the player must gather wood to repair their shelter while maintaining a stable supply of stamina and health points.

How we built it

We built Cellular Calamity using Unity6 allowing for immersive and dynamic 2D top-down that could be altered by the environment. We used our own drawn sprites to animate and render the game for an aesthetically pleasing game. The backend logic was built by scripts in C# to handle resource tracking, collision and player stats, while the natural disaster patterns used different Cellular Automony to best mimic real life.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we encountered was using Unity Version Control as this was out first time working with Unity we came across many issues with merging and resolving issues involving multiple different pushes. Additionally, we ran into difficulties creating each natural disaster event that interacted with many different scripts and game objects. The algorithm we used had many flaws resulting in many hours of debugging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud that we were able to accomplish the creation of our project within 24 hours despite this being our first time working with Unity and coding in C#. Overcoming this learning curve and building a functional prototype in such a short timeframe was a huge achievement for us. It was rewarding for us to see our ideas come to life and gave us the confidence to continue to reach ambitious goals.

What we learned

Through the development of Cellular Calamity we learned a lot about game development and the Unity environment. Our biggest takeaway was understanding the core concepts of Unity from managing game objects to writing scripts in C#. Working with C# for the first time was also a great learning experience, as we became familiar with its syntax and OOP we were able to implement more features.

What's next for Cellular Calamity

Looking ahead Cellular Calamity plans to add more features such as hurricanes, and earthquakes, each with its own unique cellular automata algorithm, also systems to be able to craft tools, build shelters, and farm and catch food. We plan to add a leadership score to the game and maybe create a multiplayer feature allowing for a more competitive and dynamic environment. We also, plan to add an education system to teach people about natural disasters and spread awareness about preparedness.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates