Inspiration
Our team (TEA) is composed of me and my neighbor Sam. As chemical engineering and computer science majors with a shared passion for experiments, we naturally leaned towards this idea.
What it’s about
Our game, ‘Mad Chemist’ is about…well…a mad chemist. The game takes place in a zombie apocalypse, where the player has to gather materials around him and then use those materials to make chemicals and machines in his lab. As the game progresses, the player then uses those creations to clear up area taken by zombies. The final goal? To build a rocket.
How we built it
Using a combination of Unity, Blender, and Adobe Photoshop, we built this project up from the ground up. I came up with the recipes and modeled a lot of the graphics whereas Sam wrote the code and added shaders. To make things efficient and doable, Sam added placeholders for a lot of the models till the end.
Challenges we ran into
Our journey here was possibly the most challenging 24 hours for us, ever. The first challenge we ran into was the inventory system. It took us several hours to figure out and style, but when we finished, it felt extremely satisfying and it was easy to add new recipes. Our second challenge was the player’s learning curve. Trying to balance the game between resource-gathering, fighting, and then a clean crafting minigame for every recipe was brutal. While not necessarily the most balanced in the end, we certainly think that it’s a lot of fun to play. Our third and greatest challenge has to be staying awake. We decided that we’d do it all in around 24 hours straight as we go on vacation directly after the hackathon. After around 10 cups of coffee and an energy drink each, we just barely stayed awake long enough to finish.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Outside of completing the previously mentioned challenges, the pure innovation behind the game, the uniqueness, and the originality is definitely one of the biggest achievements we’ve accomplished during this hackathon.
What we learned
We learned a lot. I, for one, learned how to speedrun low-poly models and how a LOT of things around us (cars, solar panels, various common chemicals) are made. Sam learned how to make things look freakin sick with toon/comic book shaders, and he won’t stop talking about the amount of code he wrote, so I’m sure he learned something there.
What's next for Mad Chemist
We’re probably gonna release the game in a month or so. While it’s already 80% of our vision, polishing it up and fixing glitches is a majority of the work left. Eventually, though, we’ll release it on Steam. We aren’t expecting too many people to play it, and we’re putting it on Steam more as a totem of accomplishment than anything.
Note: We could not manage to upload our game to itch.io or any other platform for the time being. We will upload it properly when we get back from vacation if required. All gameplay was taken from the game engine.
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