Internet Exploder

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  One of the many hazards in the game: Malware

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  The Villain

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  The firewall, a useful powerup

Inspiration

As a team mostly made of people who could have this hackathon be our very last one due to graduating soon, we wanted to do something fun and quirky to make some memories. Amusing jokes and funny concepts eventually lead to Internet Exploder.

What it does

Internet Exploder is a game that's based around the idea of the vengeful return of Internet Explorer. Many people remember how slow and buggy it was at times, and we wanted to capture that in this game. You have to dodge bugs, viruses, malware, and more as you try to take down the browser before it gets too powerful. A simple concept, but a lot of fun!

How we built it

The team utilized the Unity Game Engine to create our game, taking advantage of its easily accessible game assets and convenient features to create more things faster. Work was split among ourselves to maximize productivity.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was figuring out the relatively steep learning curve that is collisions in Unity. There are many different methods for handling them, and not all of them worked for what we wanted. With enough effort and research however, we were able to overcome it. Another major challenge was getting GitHub to work with Unity. We started learning pretty quickly that the built in GitHub for Unity tool was not very precise and tended to mostly do what we wanted, and that combined with a couple slip-ups in version control really set us back once or twice.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The general aesthetic of the game, while simplistic, is something we're all pretty proud of. It took a while to decide on certain aspects of the design like background music, hazard assets, and how to handle certain scenarios. The fact that we essentially completed everything we set out to do this time around is definitely something we're proud of. In the past, we had not really been able to do that.

What we learned

• How to utilize certain functions of Unity
• How to connect Unity to GitHub
• New techniques for using GitHub
• How to stitch together a simple concept and story for a game

What's next for Internet Exploder

In the early stages of development while we were still fleshing out the major points of the design, we had an idea to increase the game's length by establishing a story of moving through the ages of technology and leaving IE behind, only for it to come back with a vengeance. The player would navigate mazes of cluttered desktops from older windows versions, eventually finding ways to more and more current versions, up until Windows 10, where the current version of Internet Exploder begins. Perhaps the infamous browser isn't quite finished after the game's events, either...

Built With

• audacity
• c#
• gimp
• github
• unity