Gridclock

Inspiration

One of our members had a project on graphs was due soon, which led our minds to pathfinding. So we decided to try and make a game based on it.

We had previously decided on making a web app, and we agreed that it would fit the game, making it accessible anywhere.

We wanted to emulate those web games which you would mindlessly play for hours, recreating their high-score-centric gameplay and their replayable nature

What it does

The game takes place on a grid, where you must navigate different paths to gain extra time before the timer runs out. Taking different paths takes different amounts of your precious seconds

The muddy paths are the slowest, paved roads take a average amount of time and the icy blue paths let you glide by with ease.

You must use these paths to navigate to squares that give you extra time. A few more seconds to slow your eventual demise. And when you reach these squares, the entire board gets randomized once again and the race against time begins once again.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest hurdle we had to overcome was our inexperience in Javascript. We decided the best way to learn was having to actually put it into practice.

Now did come with a few downsides, like truckload of errors and having to come to terms with how little we knew, but thanks to bit of perseverance and a whole lot help from tutorials and mentors, we managed to actually complete it

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The making of the grid, the structuring of the different elements, and honestly we're just glad it works

What we learned

The journey of this project was an amazing opportunity to learn about the languages we used and to know our current limits. It also taught us a whole lot about things to not do during project development, such as:

Starting late : We had a lot of trouble coming up with ideas, and that could have been remedied by starting in advance, meeting up before the hackathon and making a plan

Not having a clear idea : to add on the previous point, we didn't take the proper time to clearly define what we were going to do. And yes, projects always go though a significant amount changes before completion, but we should have made sure that everyone was on the same page at the start. We discovered down the line that we had conflicting ideas on what we imagined the project to be, which was caused by our...

Bad communication : Without proper communication, it's easy for people to just do their own thing, with no idea that the things they're working on might overlap with someone else. It's easier on you to just focus on what you're doing, but that just leads to wasted effort.

We'll definitely make efforts to avoid this in the future

What's next for Gridclock

As you can see, it's a little rough around the edges, but I believe that inside the jank, there's a good game waiting to bloom

First we'll try to align everything better, and also replace the abstract shapes with images people recognize, that'll make the gameplay more intuitive and easy to understand.

Then we'll have to work on the balancing to provide the right amount of tension to the game.

Then we can work on adding more features, like the paths you take having effects outside of reducing time. And also maybe make the grid larger to add more choices.

We'd love to see what we spent these past hours creating become something beyond what we imagined it to be.