CubeConquer

Main screen of the game
Start of a 4 players game

Inspiration

In our team we all love developing and when we heard about the HackUPC we thought about applying to see how it was (it's our first time in a hackathon). Since we heard about IThinkUPC was looking for a video game, we immediately knew we had to do one.

What it does

It's a Real Time Strategy game running in a computer, in which 2 to 4 players can connect through their mobile browsers to compete for the control of 10 bases. The objective of the game is to conquer all positions starting with the same amount of troops, so strategy is key if you want to win the other players. The browser controller sends queries to a database with their movements, which are read by the viewer and then represented in a 3D world via Unity3D. Both the controller and the viewer have a lot of functionalities and details that make the game look as it does. Game Installer: link Player Controller: link

How we built it

We set up a server running Ubuntu Server 20.04 in which we installed Apache and MySQL to set up the website and the database. Half of the group have worked in the website controller while the other one was developing the viewer using Unity3D.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges we never thought we would get into, like the security of our server and the way we should connect to it (SSH, SFTP, PHP...) because we started all from zero, our server didn't even have OS. We also learned a lot while debugging the Unity3D code (C#) or the PHP and thinking about algorithms and solutions to make the game run the fastest possible while not missing anything.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to say we finished this project because we spent a lot of hours, not only programming but also learning and solving errors, so we could develop our ideas in new environments (some of us have never programmed in PHP or JavaScript languages).

What we learned

We definitely have learned a lot about how connections into a database work and how to implement those communications between servers and clients.

What's next for CubeConquer

Due to the lack of time, we couldn't implement all the details we would have liked because while we were developing it we thought in new ideas for the game, some of them were unable to be finished in time, but we still can add them after the hackathon and maybe add some ads in our website to pay for the server maintenance. We also thought about exporting the viewer to Android and uploading it to the Play Store. We definitely have a lot of motivation to keep up developing this project and see how it ends going.