Life of a Sea Turtle

Inspiration

We were inspired by the thousands of turtles who die due to being entangled in plastic. Plastic waste in the ocean kills millions of animals each year. Worst of all, this is all easily preventable. We created this game to spread awareness about the issue and make a more sustainable ocean.

What it does

Players control a turtle and try to reach the jellyfish to advance to the next level. While doing so, they use arrow tiles to redirect to reach the goal while simultaneously trying to avoid plastic tiles. Player lose if their turtle hits the plastic. Recycling tiles provide protection for one plastic bag, showing how recycling protects the turtles. After completing 6 levels, you reach the beach and win!

How we built it

We used a free program called LÖVE which is a framework for making 2D games using the programming language Lua. This program is particularly user and beginner friendly making it beneficial to our collaboration.

Challenges we ran into

There were many bugs that came with trying to implement the masks and different stages of the game. To solve this we decided to use a state machine that would track the states of the player and the game and change based on certain inputs and actions to allow the game to run continuously while the player is moving.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to come together from a range of different computer science backgrounds to coordinate a collaboration and complete an interactive product that incorporates the theme of sustainability.

What we learned

We learned that there were many more technical aspects to creating the structure of the game than we expected and that debugging was almost as if not more time consuming than actually coding, especially when collaborating, which resulted in rigorous testing from each member.

What's next for Life of a Sea Turtle

We believe that our game has a large potential for improvement including balancing the difficulty and randomness. Additionally, we plan to add features such as controlling multiple turtles at once and adding more levels in the future.