Mage Hand

A PVE game based on American Sign Language that helps you learn the alphabet through casting magic spells.

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Inspiration

When making Mage Hand, we drew inspiration from several fighting games, including Mortal Kombat, but most of the inspiration came from our want to create a fun, interesting way for people of all ages - including children - to learn how to communicate in ASL.

What It Does

Mage Hand, above all, helps people to learn the ASL alphabet. It does this in an entertaining, fun and creative way and helps people open up their communities to those without the ability to hear.

How We Build It

With the use of Unity and Blender, and lots of tutorials, we created a workable hand - which we wanted as our main feature - an environment and enemies to fight.

Challenges We Ran Into

All of us working on Mage Hand were complete beginners, none of us had done a hackathon before and we took on a whole lot in this one. We ran into plenty of challenges, including but not limited to how to make the hand, how to make the title screen, how the health bar could work, etc. This was our first time using the Unity Engine and the C# language for all of us.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

We are super proud of what we accomplished, which overall is making an actual, functioning game. Especially after several people told us how crazy we were to attempt to render an entire hand in Blender for a game we were making in around 36 hours.

What We Learned

We learned some great collaboration and team work skills. All of the group learned a new programming language (C#) and how to use Unity. We also all learned that if you set your mind to it, you really can do anything.

What's Next for Mage Hands

If we had the opportunity, refining the game would be a big one. Brushing up on the design of the environment and enemies, adding a tutorial, adding a toggle menu that shows you all your attacks, possibly having other signs (ones that are the full word and not just the finger spelling) and other things that would make the design and game much smoother. On the bigger side, it would be absolutely amazing if we could utilize motion capture technology to allow the person playing the game to actually do the signs for themselves, instead of just clicking buttons for the in game one to do so.

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