Happy Harvesters is a game made for kids aged 10 and below, with the intention of teaching them the fundamental values of how farming a crop can earn money.
Inspiration - This project is inspired by children’s books and a simple game called Cookie Clicker. Our goal was to merge the way children’s books present real-world concepts in an accessible manner with engaging gameplay. Cookie Clicker perfectly exemplifies this approach; its core mechanics of clicking and upgrading rewards provide an effective framework for integrating these two elements.
What it does - To do this the game uses very basic functions, beginning with clicking on an image of wheat. Every time the wheat is clicked, they gain money; to increase the amount they are earning the player uses the money they earned to upgrade farm equipment, buy livestock, and buy more land. This teaches kids a basic idea of how running a farm works and how it makes money, in a simple easy to understand way.
How we built it - We chose Python for our project because most of us were skilled in it. During our initial meeting, we brainstormed ideas for our game and decided to create something similar to Cookie Clicker. Most of our Saturday was spent troubleshooting and learning to implement new features. We collaborated by sharing our code through a VS Code extension that works online. Each team member took on specific roles, focusing on different aspects like mechanics, descriptions, and inputs/outputs.
Challenges we ran into - At the start, we encountered several challenges. First, some parts of our code didn’t run as expected, which required us to learn new techniques to troubleshoot effectively.
One major hurdle was collaborating on the same code. We spent about an hour just figuring out how to use LiveShare, a tool that allowed us to work together on the same code.
Another challenge was formatting our code to neatly display our “Hoes” and “Animals.”, the issue we encountered was the text was displaying randomly spaced out, to fixed this by setting a fixed width.
Another was learning how to increment the text attached to our upgrades and livestock as we upgraded them.
Accomplishments that we're proud of - Working as a group to accomplish a project was a big thing we were proud of, none of us have real experience working on projects like this. We are very proud of the fact we made something that worked in the way we planned.
What we learned - One of the many things that we learned in this project was being able to print out images in our folder to be used within our program. These images are what we used to represent each of the upgradable items in our shop, textures for Land, and then for the regular game. Another takeaway from this project was being able to learn how to use various function types within python. We learned how to use tkinter to modify, configure, and change various parameters of buttons and labels. We learned how to loop a function so that it automatically updates the screen as well as increasing money per second.
What's next for Happy Harvest – The next step for Happy Harvest would be to expand on more advanced functions so that kids can learn more aspects about how farming works in the real world. Implementing taxes and equipment repair costs could be a possible step for the future.
Built With - We used Python to code the language. The software we used to run and debug our code was VS Code, meanwhile we used Live Share to work on a file at the same time. A big tool of ours when coding was using google to be able to find solutions to a problem we were facing.
Credits: https://titanarrow.com/ift.html
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Iron_Hoe
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Gold_Hoe
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Wooden_Hoe
https://www.shutterstock.com/search/cow-pixel-art
chatgpt.org (Used to fill in gaps that we didn't know how to do)
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