FLIGHT

April the owl encounters cloudy decisions during her adventure in the sky!

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Inspiration

Developed at AthenaHacks, created by an Athena and a Kate. :) Sometimes it's difficult to talk about online harassment, or harassment in general. We wanted to work with the theme of the hackathon, Athena and owls, with the topic of online harassment in some way. Knowing that online harassment is an uncomfortable topic that should nevertheless be talked about, we wanted to start a discussion and stimulate thought about what we should do if or when we encounter these situations online. Consequently, we settled on creating an Android mobile application game that lets these ideas be discussed while trying to have some fun.

What it does

FLIGHT is an Android mobile game! As our owl, April, flies through the clouds to find a mouse to eat, encounter clouds, and dodge lightning along the way!

FLIGHT is great for those who are beginning to use social media, or middle/high school students. Hopefully, users will learn a little more about what to do if they ever encounter an uncomfortable situation online that could be harmful to other people. Tilt your phone in the direction you want April to move! Try to earn more points by eating mice and avoid lightning. Along the way, if you're in a cloud, you might face a cloudy decision to make.

How we built it

We used Unity in 2D (C#) to create the program. The art was created in Photoshop Elements.

Challenges we ran into

Neither of us ever knew C# or used Unity before AthenaHacks 2017, so we had to learn everything here and on the spot! Athena didn't sleep, except for that one 5-minute nap that really doesn't count, and Kate would absolutely love her bed anytime soon. Although we managed to get the accelerometer working on our Android phone so we can move around, we didn't have enough time within the 24 hours to fix all the bugs or do all the functionalities we wanted to implement, but we sure are darn proud of how much we learned in just this weekend. It's really about progress rather than trying to achieve perfection, and we progressed a lot in mobile development.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

It's Athena's first hackathon! We learned so much this weekend, and we persisted through all the learning curves this weekend. From knowing nothing about Unity to creating what we did, we're happy with how it all turned out. Both of us worked with our full effort in such a time crunch, and we always tried to help each other when we were stuck in our code or download challenges.

What we learned

First and foremost: UNITY. Neither of us had ever programmed in Unity before, but as an artist and an avid gamer, the two of us decided that we really should learn how to make use of such a powerful game development tool. We learned all about creating two-dimensional sprites, dynamically resizing our content, layering components on top of one another, and, most importantly of all...remembering to add elements to our components in the inspector -- the little things always seem to be the most challenging. Speaking of little things, we also learned to work with a mobile environment for the first time in our computer science careers, and I can certainly say that even while our program was not running correctly, simply getting the code that we wrote to show up on that tiny screen was a rather exhilarating feeling.

What's next for FLIGHT

Well, as this is our first mobile app ever, we definitely want to finish it! We haven't even touched one of the main inspirations behind the app -- the social harassment aspect -- so we're feeling pretty excited about finishing what we started. We intend to add the educational features and clean up the user interface to create an app as beautiful as the artwork backing it.

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