Save the Turtles

Game Screen
Game Over Screen
Background
Turtle
Seagrass
Plastic Bottle

Inspiration

We wanted to make a game, not unlike those often seen online as well as app stores. However, we wanted our game to also do something more -- spread awareness about the pollution in the ocean and how it affects sea turtles and other marine life.

What it does

Includes multiple game elements, such as sprites, a score counter and interactivity. The player’s goal is to maximize their score by avoiding the plastic bottle sprites and collecting the food (sea grass). When the player hits a plastic bottle, the game ends. A game over screen shows the score, a turtle fact, an ad (so that the app can contribute funds to charity) and an option to start over.

How we built it

Collaborating on VS Code, we used Python to create the initial game with the Pygame package. Then, our team member Mary designed and drew the sprites and background to be imported into the game.

Challenges we ran into

As expected, we ran into a lot of bugs. Because most of us were new to the Python programming language, it was difficult for us to comprehend the documentation of pygame. This led to an assortment of errors within our code when we ran it through the terminal because we were unclear on which parameters to apply into the functions.

Additionally, the nature of our code made it pretty unreadable, since all classes, functions, and main calls were under the same file. We often used our code revision time trying to figure out where in the code we needed to insert or delete elements. A more efficient way to approach this is to separate everything into separate classes, so that access time is shortened when referencing each section of our code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud that at the end, we managed to make a working game. Although this may seem like a small accomplishment, being able to make a project with functionality is exactly what we wished to accomplish during this hackathon.

What we learned

This project taught us a lot about the Python programming language and the Pygame library. We also had the pleasure of working together as a team, which taught us many important skills such as active listening, problem solving, and creativity.

What's next for Save the Turtle

We wish to expand on what we have by adding additional features to the game. We can implement levels of increasing difficulty. Currently, our plastic bottles and food sprites move at a constant speed relative to the turtle, so it would be interesting to explore how the difficulty is challenged with varying speeds.