Title Screen
Starting Game
Level 1
Level 3
Game Over Terminal Screen
Leaderboard
main.py

Inspiration

The inspiration behind Syntax Error is a combination of everything we as computer scientists love and hate: video games, development, bugs, and the idea of our technology breaking. As developers, we can spend endless hours programming only to watch it get ruined by bugs, with some experiences leading to hardware issues and hacks. We wanted to take that experience, and transform it into a thrilling game where everyone can find the love, anxiety, and joy that comes from development, all within a coding based tower defense game.

What it does

Syntax error is an arcade-style tower defense game infused with a coding twist. Built with Python and Pygame, the game combines foundational computer science ideas into real-time strategy. You'll need to defend your CPU, deploying Debuggers, Firewalls, and Antiviruses to combat against Bugs, Memory Leaks, Zero-Day vulnerabilities, and Injection payloads that follow dynamic path finding in order to ruin your code and CPU.

How we built it

We built Syntax Error in Pygame, as a way to learn a new way to develop video games and expand our experience with Python. Additionally, we incorporated Claude and Antigravity into our programming development to speed up development. For designs, we used a mixture of hand-drawn images and images generated by Adobe FireFly, where we used the hand-drawn images as the references to guide the other art pieces used.

Challenges we ran into

The key challenges we ran into, and overcame, were integrating a live "Compiler" that can execute and be held back by code, combining and using all of the most appropriate path finding algorithms, and creating an engaging and thematically appropriate UI and gameplay.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our accomplishments are high and vast, starting with the fact that Knight Hacks IX was the first hackathon that both of us attended. Building a complete project in 36 hours was an achievement in it of itself, but on top of it we learned how best to work with agents in order to build develop code in a healthy relationship with them and develop video games with little footprint in Pygame.

What we learned

The takeaways we got from this experience was how powerful a sidekick AI agents can be, the ways to incorporate different path finding techniques dynamically, the , and Pygame's ability to create fully fleshed out 2D video games with charming art.

What's next for Syntax Error

In the future, Syntax Error will have a more user-friendly and introductory-friendly compilers, potentially with unlock paths, a universal database to see what the high-score is across every player, the ability to save in the middle of games, incorporating more path-finding for actions executed by players, and more custom sprites or art to further the creativity and theme.