InVitro

dreamy night
reality

immerse yourself in a platformer with eye-gaze tracking and eye blinking detection with cute graphics

inspiration

celeste, sky, spiritfarer, and the constancy of the feeling that anywhere would be better than now

what it does

its a game with a unique gimmick and a story and theme we really like!

how we built it

we used pygame, 2 eye-tracking apis we found online, and 24 hours of blood sweat and tears :)

challenges we ran into

we ran into a lot of issues head-on just trying to install dependencies and finding softwares that would both work and work together. afterwards, we all had to learn how to work in pygame, and it was challenging to build a solid framework that could support both game functions and our special eye-tracking feature.

accomplishments that we're proud of

we're proud of having the solid foundations for a functional game, as well as successful creative elements such as cutscene art, cute animations, and nostalgic (original!) acoustic music. we feel that we really conveyed the vision we had in mind!

what we learned

we learned that there's a lot that goes into designing a fully functioning game as a product. for instance, it took us quite a bit of time to figure out how to integrate the third-party softwares, and it was also difficult just to standardize the game across 4 different laptops on top of trying to make all our aesthetics fit together. there was much more time and thought put in to making our game than simply having an enticing vision.

whats next

the first order of business is to finish a working prototype for the entire game we have planned, refactor all the code, then make the interface and game mechanics more and more polished. we would also like to transition from pygame to a more versatile game engine such as godot or unity. we'd also love to finish our story!

Built With

eyeware
multiprocessing
pygame
python

Submitted to

HackMIT 2023

Created by

creative lead for music and story and vibes/aesthetic :)

also coding

lucifer san
I got to get my hands dirty with python for the very first time! I have only ever used MATLAB before. After watching a lot of tutorials and reading documentation I was able to make some contributions in terms of code and setting up the eye-tracking API / getting the functional quirks to work in smaller environments. I also worked on storyboarding, art, and level-design.

Lucas Ospina-Quintero
I worked on designing sprites and cutscenes, and also helped set up code and dependencies for eye tracking. Also worked on game code

Andrea Jia
I wrote the framework for the game, somewhat passable modules for creating levels and all kinds of sprites, and created the code for animating and processing the first cutscene and level, and wrote the wrapper for all eye-tracking-related functions, and multiprocessing to (somewhat) optimize the code & frame rate.

Albert Wang