Inspiration
During this past year, we have seen the abundant efforts made by all the essential workers. They have risked their lives to help us get through this pandemic. Unfortunately, there are some that are not able to comprehend the severity of our current predicament, and its effects on the world. That is why we decided to create a game to model a busy ICU to help make others more aware of the seriousness of soaring case numbers.
What it does
Our game starts off in the main menu, where we are introduced to three different buttons. The first is the play button, where we begin our adventure as an ICU member, and the second is the instructions button where we are given key information. The third includes a short message from the creators (aka us! :D), in which we acknowledge all of the front line workers who have been fighting hard for us.
Once we click play, we are introduced to the ICU office. We can move around using the arrow keys. When a client needs help, a pop-up message will appear. We must go into the room and type in a word that is chosen at random. Our task is to help as many clients as we can in the given amount of time which is around 30 seconds. In addition, successfully helping 10 clients will result in something special! But, it’s not an easy task to manage!
After we are met with the game over message (or the special one), we will be redirected back to the main menu by clicking the X or by pressing the Esc button on our keyboard.
How we built it
We first started off by designing all of our characters, texts, and backgrounds on Google Slides. Afterwards, we began to code using PyGame. We spent a while creating barriers and boundaries for the character by determining whether or not they were between certain ranges of pixels, and restricting them if so.
Next, we decided to get the typing feature up and running, which involved generating a list of medical-related terms for the computer to choose from, at random, and making it possible to receive input and display text. To complete the “base” of the game, we created a timer, which was simply a number that was continually subtracted from until it reached zero, and made a scoring system.
To wrap it all up, we created the other pages, including the main menu, the instructions, our message, and the game over screen, by making them additional functions within our code.
Challenges we ran into
When we first started programming the barriers, we came across the challenge of what intervals to put the player at, so that they did not go past them. We started off by eyeballing the pixel numbers, but realized pretty quickly that it was not an effective strategy. So, we proceeded to print out the coordinates to make sure that the intervals were accurate. Once we figured out how to prevent the user from leaving the boundaries, things were smooth sailing… until we had to create the timer. That also took a solid amount of researching, since PyGame did not have a single timer function. Our final biggest challenge was connecting the different “screens” and making it possible to navigate around them. We figured that it would be most effective to make each screen a different function, and then simply calling them when the time was right. That seemed to solve our last challenge.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We can say with complete confidence that we are proud of our entire game. If we had to choose only a few features, we would have to say that our favourite and most fulfilling parts were the multiple screens (main menu, instructions, game, ec.) and the moving player with boundaries. These parts were also some of the most challenging aspects, which only made the result more rewarding. Overall, it was even surprising to us that we, young teenagers with only a little coding experience, were able to create it all.
What we learned
We learned so much from this hackathon. We had little to no knowledge about PyGame whatsoever. Thus, through this experience, we learned how to create a screen, render text, add keyboard/ mouse events, and more!
What's next for ICU Meltdown - Pygame
As mentioned above, our main goal with this game was to give people a taste of how stressful front-line workers may feel with a full ICU. We truly hope that we can allow the user to better understand the severity of our current predicament so that as a community, we can do our part to stay safe and slow the spread of COVID-19.
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