COVID: Keep Your Distance

Beginning Screen
Text Display
Title Screen

Inspiration

13 months. 57 weeks. 399 days. These numbers define how long the Coronavirus has been in our lives. With the pandemic showing no signs of stopping, the figures continue to increase. The main reason for this unending virus is the disinformation and lack of knowledge going around. Especially with teenagers and children, it is hard to inform them about the dangers of going outside and disobeying state regulations. Many want to hang out with their friends, find masks to be uncomfortable, and belittle the effects of the virus. Although kids can be educated through lessons and talks, they are not ideal methods because kids are not interested in listening and their attention spans are very short. So, we decided to take a different approach with COVID: Keep Your Distance.

Through COVID: Keep Your Distance, we aspire to spread essential information to those who aren’t well informed, specifically young ones, through a video game. Teaching children through their favorite activity can be an effective solution to raise awareness about the coronavirus.

What It Does

COVID: Keep Your Distance is a progressive video game aimed at using fun to educate the player about the coronavirus.

The game is inspired by our daily lives, with a park as its setting and the player as a character taking a walk. The player must avoid the coronavirus falling from the sky or thrown up, and maintain a “six feet” distance from other characters. Within contact of a virus or a passerby, the game leads the player to a variety of coronavirus related facts and guidelines.

How We Built It

After a few hours of discussion, we divided ourselves into 2 backends and 1 frontend. Naisha and Jocelyn worked on creating the base of the game with Python, and Jenny created the sprites and designs of the game.

Challenges We Ran Into

When we first started out, we had a hard time coming up with ideas. We wanted to make a program that could make a difference in some way, but we also needed a project where we could combine all of our experiences with coding. Eventually though, we were able to come up with COVID, Keep Your Distance. When building the program, one of our biggest challenges was getting the correct collision of the sprites. There was a confusion of what the x and y coordinates of the text should display after the collisions because the alignment was off center and the text was surpassing the screen dimension. Furthermore, it was our first time using Python, so there was a lot of experimenting and research throughout the day.

Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of

We are proud of being able to make this game from scratch with no prior knowledge of Pygame, and to make an informational video game that can help children understand the severity of COVID 19 and how important it is to follow all safety guidelines. We hope that our game can be used to spread awareness of this virus.

What we learned

Like mentioned previously, this was our first time creating a game with Python. Through this project, we were able to learn how to use Pygame and code a game from scratch. We are excited to continue learning more and to gain more experience through more hackathons.

What’s Next

For the second iteration of our informational game, we hope to make it more advanced. As the game is relatively simple, it would be better to add more dynamics, such as power-ups and shields, so that the player can have a little more control of the character. Furthermore, it would be more interesting to add a storyline to the game and have a final boss in order to maintain a longer playtime and thus a more informative game. We are also aiming to insert more information into the game and have them vary as the player gets caught so that the player can end the game with a plentiful amount of knowledge.