Duel-64

Example of game play
A player with wings outside their base
A player's turn inside their base
UI for purchasing a Mine
UI for purchasing a Spike Trap

Inspiration

We were inspired by classic strategy games like Civilization that involve building and attacking with multiple avenues for victory. We find that it can be hard to find time to play such games because games take many hours, so we wanted to bring the same core elements to a quicker, more accessible game for a wider audience. Duel-64 is a fun, interactive game with good replayability that combines some of our favorite elements from games like two spies and chess. Games of Duel-64 are typically a few minutes, which is easy to fit into a busy schedule.

What it does

Duel-64 is a turn based, board-game style strategy game. Players win by either killing their opponent, destroying all their buildings, or accumulating 50 coins. The game allows two people to build up a base, purchase gear and fight to defeat the other player. Players have the freedom to choose their own strategy, such as attacking and destroying their opponent's buildings, or building up their own base. The lack of a dominant strategy and the potential for creative tricks makes Duel-64 fun and addicting. Our game features a robust user interface that prevents users from making invalid moves by providing them with only correct choices. A user has a simple choice of options on their turn and we have found that people understand the controls very quickly.

How we built it

We built this project purely in python using the pygame library. We focused significant development effort into creating fun, balanced game mechanics and strived to create a simple, coherent user experience. After having the initial idea, we play tested it with a simple board game setup and made significant changes to the rules. Nicholas focused on backend and coded the game logic, while Lydia designed the game interface. Then, we worked together for the UI and constructed the game loop.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to design the backend for the game in a modular fashion and handle mechanics in a generalizable way, so that this game can be expanded with more items and buildings in the future in a maintainable way. This caused headaches at times during the design process as we fought the urge to hard code hacky solutions for specific mechanics to get it done more quickly. We will benefit from this design overhead in the future when we add a special shop to the game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to create this fun, interactive and balanced strategic game. Early on our game had less interaction between users during play testing, but we added a few extra mechanics, like the ability to place buildings anywhere for an extra cost, to make it more fun. We are proud to create an aesthetic and user-friendly interface that makes the game super easy to learn for new players. Lydia is also proud to help make an entire well-designed game with very little coding experience, and she fell in love with coding from this hackathon.

What we learned

We learned the importance of keeping our programs simple, especially given the limited time for development. When brainstorming ideas for the game, we had many ideas for cool mechanics that would involve additional user interaction that we didn't end up implementing to keep user interaction as straightforward as possible. This made developing the UI feasible in the time period and also helps keep the interface more understandable for new users.

What's next for Duel-64

We want to add a special shop to the game with more powerful, but specialized items. Only a few of these items will be available at once and purchasing one will replace it with a new random item from the pool. Some items we have in mind include an amplifier for the spike trap that enhances its attack range when paired as a combo, a force field generator that shields certain number of surrounding buildings, or a fire based weapon that destroys an additional level of surrounding buildings every turn. We think this can help spice up the game for seasoned users.