Dino Game

Inspiration

We were inspired by Tamagotchi style games, and wanted to create a web-based version of the game.

The original inspiration for the Dino game was an AI Financial Advisor geared to high schoolers and college students. The Dinosaur's "health" would be replaced by a system that keeps track of the financial health of the student and their financial decisions.

However, we were unable to achieve those goals during this camp

What it does

It keeps track of the number of days the dinosaur has stayed alive, can switch to see the history of the dinosaur's life (including when it got sick, and the changes in energy every day).

How we built it

We built the program on Visual Code using the Framework Flutter. Since it was our first time building a web-project, it took us some time to figure out the best way to set up a web-project. Using this tutorial on Google https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/flutter-codelab-first#6, we learned the main formatting and structure of a Flutter project. Then, we used our knowledge from this tutorial to build our own Game.

Challenges we ran into

As high schoolers with minimal college experience with programming, we had a lot to learn during BitCamp (Although we are excited about it). We ran into the challenge of being generally unfamiliar with web-development, the language Dart, and it learning to use the terminal for the first time. The most difficult part of this project was definitely the initial set up. We kept trying different IDEs (IntelliJ, VS Code, and PyCharm) and Frameworks (Flask and Django) to create the web application. Although we could install all the plug ins and files required, it was difficult to get an understanding of the project.

Since I wanted to learn more about interactive websites and how to build them, I decided to join the App Dev Sessions. That is where I first learned about Flutter, and decided to incorporate it into the project. Flutter's object-oriented structure with inheritance is similar to Java, with Widgets instead of classes.

To learn the structure of Flutter projects, we used a tutorial from google code labs, as well as the help of the mentors at Bitcamp

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're especially proud of learning a new language and setting up an entirely new Framework in order to create this project.

We're also proud of the pixelated dinosaur drawings.

What we learned

While researching different web-development frameworks, and implementing them into various IDEs, we learned terminal commands and how to use the terminal to install packages (on both python using pip and Flutter using pub command)

We learned some of the basics of website development, including learning how a grid-based layout system works. It was also exciting to learn how to use Stacks on Flutter.

What's next for Dino Game

The Dino Game is extremely simple right now. But we are hoping to add more user-interaction. For example, when the player wins the game, there should be confetti that falls from the top of the screen, And if they lose, there should be some comets that slide across the screen

We are eager to continue to expand on this game so that it can be a robust and fun way to learn about financial literacy and develop good saving habits. This will involve using Google's Gemini API and Nessie API in order to access financial information and run it through an AI for specific evidence.

Built With

• dart
• flutter
• piskel
• visual-studio