Inspiration
Our inspiration for this project came straight from our own experience at HooHacks! While brainstorming throughout the event, we realized how exciting and dynamic a hackathon can be. It was full of choices, challenges, and surprises. This sparked the idea to turn this experience into an interactive game, letting players navigate their own HooHacks journey just like we did!
What it does
HHCYOA - HooHacks Create Your Own Adventure is an interactive game that lets players experience a HooHacks hackathon from the comfort of their computer! The choices the player makes shapes their journey through the game. The player can either focus on projects, attend workshops, or balance both. Depending on their choice, they'll either work on a project, explore up to five workshops, or attend two workshops before diving into project development.
How we built it
We built our game using Java and the Swing package to create an interactive graphical interface. Players start at an opening page and choose their hackathon journey by clicking one of three buttons: Projects only, Workshops only, and Project and Workshop. Each part of the game creates a new page, where every new page is handled by its own class. This ensures modularity and smooth navigation where the player can simply close the window once they are done with it.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was deciding on the actual game idea. We had multiple ideas flowing in, but we wanted to make something that was specific to this experience. Writing the starter code took time, as we had to plan out the flow of the game step by step. Additionally, we were completely new to using Java Swing; we learned how to use graphics from scratch for this project. However, once we got the basics of Java Swing down, the rest of the project was completed quite smoothly.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of building a functioning game using Java Swing, especially since we learned it from scratch during the hackathon. Mastering the graphics class was a huge milestone, allowing us to create an interactive and engaging experience. Despite the challenges, we successfully brought our ideas to life and developed a game to potentially capture the spirit of HooHacks!
What we learned
We learned that picking up a new skill can be challenging, but the best way to learn is by building something hands-on. Creating this game pushed us to understand Java Swing and graphics, and while this is our current best work, we are excited to keep improving and expanding our skills in the future.
What's next for HHCYOA - HooHacks Create Your Own Adventure
We plan to expand the game by adding more choices throughout the journey. Right now, workshops simply display summaries, but in the future, we want the players to actively navigate through them, where each decision can change the trajectory of their journey. Integrating this into the project will make the game even more immersive and dynamic. We're excited to keep building and refining the game to make it an even richer hackathon experience.
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