Graduation Trail

Inspiration

The project originally started as an homage to the old game Oregon Trail from 1971. We originally wanted to make a game where you guide students to graduation, but it evolved into balancing the needs of not just the students, but of all parties involved.

What it does

Every round, you pick a party that you would like to confront in regards to their problems and how you want to go about solving it. That then increases or decreases their happiness, as well as the happiness of other parties. The five parties are the students, the professors, the custodian, the budget, and yourself/your own happiness.

How we built it

We used three main architectures to build it: Python, Pygame, and CockroachDB. Python was used as the base coding language, Pygame was used for the graphics and the player interaction, and CockroachDB was used to create a leaderboard.

Challenges we ran into

The two main challenges we faced were that none of us were proficient in Python and Pygame and none of us knew how to use CockroachDB. Furthermore, we also faced the challenge of the pandemic and how we couldn't meet face to face, making this task that much harder to do.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The thing we're the most proud of is having a fully playable and even fun product. It started off as a humble idea, but finished off being a fully fledged game that could technically go on indefinitely.

What we learned

The biggest things we learned were how to use Python, Pygame, and CockroachDB. Beyond all of that, we also learned to appreciate the university staff a bit more in terms of what they do for the university.

What's next for Graduation Trail

The next step would be to make the game look nicer, add more scenarios, add some sound effects, some music, and make sure that players can't pick the same party multiple times in a row. We would also add a leaderboards page rather than just telling the player if they got the high score.

IMPORTANT NOTE

In order to run Graduation Trail, please navigate to the folder of the project in terminal, command line, or powershell and run the command "python3 venv/main.py". You can also run it directly from an IDE.