Inspiration

Disaster Detection was inspired by Five Night's At Freddy's camera systems and Home Safety Hotline's gameplay loop.

What it does

Disaster Detection is an educational game that trains players to recognize signs of different natural disasters and to act accordingly.

How I built it

I used a mix of tutorials, old forum posts, GameMaker documentation, and ChatGPT for the code.

Challenges I ran into

GameMaker's current versions aren't as well documented as other game engines, which made coding certain things difficult. There were features I had to cut because I didn't know how to implement them with everything else. My inexperience with game development, GameMaker, and Github was definitely a hurdle I had to get over.

In the last 10 minutes of the hackathon, I had encountered an error; my game wouldn't run. I tried looking online and checking through my code, but I could not find any reason why. It was all working just minutes before. In the end, I am submitting a much earlier version that does run, but does not have any of the gameplay features I had coded that produced an error. This means my game practically does not work. I am frustrated with myself but there is not much I can do as there is no time left, so all I can do is submit this old version without any of the gameplay I had coded.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I have never made a game before, only worked on small projects that I never finished. I am upset with myself that I wasn't able to even reach the minimum viable product as several key features are missing and the game can't be played the way I envisioned it, but I know that I put my best into this despite the time constraints and my inexperience. There were a lot of new things I had to learn within the time constraints and errors I had no idea how to fix, but I was able to make at least something somewhat functional in the end.

What I learned

I learned that there is still much to learn about GameMaker's features and game development in general.

What's next for Disaster Detection

The full product could implement a main menu and pause screen, a functional weather screen, music, sound effects, better art, more signs of natural disasters, and a cheat sheet to inform players on signs to look out for.