MadHacks2019Game

This was our first hackathon, so we went in with very few expectations. We had heard about them from some of our friends, so we have always been interested, but as a concept it was daunting. This was everyone’s first hackathon so the energy was really high and we just wanted to go in and get as much out of the experience as possible while making something that we were proud of. We were inspired by games like plague inc, that are sort of an analogue for trying to solve large global, existential risks given certain resource constraints and other factors. Throughout this we had to learn Java and JavaFX to build a GUI and all the math behind the interactions. During the early stages of the hackathon a big challenge we ran into was having to abandon our first idea for a 2D side scroller that ended up being too much to bite off, so we had to pivot and adjust quickly to a novel idea. Another issue was figuring out how to code the relationships between the emissions of different continents and the interactions between variables like research, education, and exogenously generated climate shocks, to make a game that was complex yet engaging to solve.

Built With

• html
• java