Going Viral

Gameplay of the first room

Inspiration

We were inspired by some of our members' fields of study (Computational Biology), and our collective love of arcade-style games. We were especially drawing from the indie game Binding of Isaac, from which we borrowed some of the format and some of the theming.

What it does

It's a bullet-hell style arcade game, themed around the immune system.

How we built it

We learned PyGame, a Python game engine library. The work was evenly split up amongst the group members, with the exception of Dresden, who was also in charge of asset design.

Challenges we ran into

PyGame lacks many of the "getting started" features common to game engines like Unity and Godot, so a lot of understanding how to set up our game and add basic features ate up a lot of our time. Additionally, due to a general lack of experience in game development on the team, we ran into many common design pitfalls and bugs that would have been avoided by a team with more experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The gameplay is addictive, despite being pretty simplistic. We also managed to create a persistent overworld navigable by properly-blocked off doorways, which was a lot more of a challenge than we'd anticipated up front.

What we learned

Many principles of game design, including how 2D rendering works, how collisions work in 2D, and some clever tricks we suspect may have also been used by older game studios to work around common pitfalls. We also learned version management using GitHub branches, which some of us hadn't properly used before the hackathon.

What's next for Going Viral

We laid out the groundwork for a very interesting, nuanced bullet-hell (i.e., our map is persistent and labeled with different "room types"); we simply lacked the time to bake more gameplay layers into our framework.