Hellbent for Rent

Inspiration

Many students can relate to being thrown into the deep end when it comes to searching for student accommodation - some of us team members having experienced this for ourselves. What to look for, what red flags to avoid, what makes a good landlord... Students often have to learn these things for ourselves after making the mistakes and suffering for it, and only after that can we feel able to make informed housing decisions in following years.

What is Hellbent for Rent?

We want to democratise knowledge around house-hunting, and what better way than through a fun and engaging game? In Hellbent for Rent, you are a student on the search for the perfect house next year. You must go through the entire process, from scouting potential housemates to going to house viewings and inspecting bedrooms. Armed with a camera to take photos of dodgy red flags to report, an observation log of your findings, a phone to contact and research your landlord, you must do your best now to avoid a hellish next year of living. We used Figma and Adobe Illustrator for our mockups and conceptualised our game with Python and PyGame in mind.

What is the point?

Our game creates an engaging and concise way to educate university students about the second year and about the house hunting process which many are not aware of. There are many things university students overlook, which the game covers in a way that is fun and easy to understand. We also want this to be a cosy game, to allow stressed students to relax.

Challenges and accomplishments

As a very ambitious team, we first tried to add as many things as possible into our initial design, so it was difficult for us to simplify the project and let go of some of the design choices to keep within the time limit and avoid our project being too convoluted.

However, this is each team member's first proper hackathon, so we are proud of not being afraid of trying new things despite our lack of experience. We also are happy to have explored our creative sides and been able to conceptualise what we think is a unique and cool idea.

What we learned and what's next

We learned how to design a game that is both engaging and appealing to our audience. On top of that, we learned how to accurately and effectively simulate a real-world problem in the game, and apply it in a way that is educational for our players.

In the future, we want to bring our designs to life and to advertise the game to as many university students as possible so they can benefit from Hellbent for Rent. Furthermore, the current design is only a fraction of what we desire for Hellbent for Rent as we have many minigames and design choices we are wanting to add.