COVID-19 Commotion

Some of our code
The introduction and instructions
The game in action!

Inspiration

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected us all hugely, not just as individuals, but also on a global scale. Precautionary measures that we now must take are not ones we are used to taking, and therefore we wanted to create a game to help people practice these new social distancing measures. The game is fun to play, and can hopefully alleviate some of the boredom we've all been feeling during the pandemic!

What is our game?

During the Coronavirus Pandemic, travelling at airports and maintaining social distancing is tough. Especially when you wake up late and realise you only have 2 hours until your flight takes off. Thankfully you manage to pack up and arrive at the airport 30 minutes before your flight. Luckily, checking in only took 5 minutes. The real issue is catching your flight before take off.Rush though the busy airport dodging fellow travellers and luggage, whilst maintaining social distancing.

How we built it

We collaborated on Repl.it so we could all work on our project together and in real time. We had a call running on Microsoft Teams for most of the duration of the hackathon, so that we could easily join and communicate with one another to discuss our ideas. Our shared word document, with a to-do list, information on the game story, and our visuals, was also helpful.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few challenges, which we were able to overcome through teamwork, some help from mentors, and of course, the internet. These challenges included:

Setting a timer to automatically refresh the game
Being able to print out the board in the correct orientation
Moving the stick man from side to side correctly according to the controls given
Using the boolean functions to show the consequence of bumping into the obstacles

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team, we are very proud of how we worked together as a team, and managed to bring all our ideas together to create a functioning game that we all enjoyed playing. We overcame the challenges together, through collaboration with one another, which is another thing we are all proud of.

What we learned

One of the key takeaways from this project is the importance of breaking down the problem and discussing exactly what we want each function to do. This helped us have a clear idea of what we’re doing and allowed us to collaborate really effectively despite being in completely different timezones. Secondly, this was our first time doing a group coding challenge and we’ve learnt how to collaborate as a team. We were of varying familiarities with coding but yet we worked really well as a team by updating each other on progress and using the join Repl.it account. We now realise the importance of discussing our thoughts before coding so that we can work really well together.

In the future?

If we had more time there are three main elements of the game that we would develop.

Make a more competitive point system so that we can take into consideration the varying importance of bumping into luggage in comparison to bumping into a person
I would also like to have more lanes so that the game is a little more challenging and encourages the player to think forward
Finally, it would be nice for the luggage to move down in a more continuous manner, rather than it being more like samples