Martian Trail

Inspiration

The game was inspired by the Oregon Trail, a game where the player uses their own judgement to navigate challenges presented throughout the game.

What it does

A rover traverses the surface of mars while random events get in their way. The player has a choice to play it safe and wait or push through these events. There are factors such as Hull integrity, rations, oxygen and water that have to be upheld. The rover has to makes it back to base in order to complete the mission.

How we built it

We spent the first day brainstorming, and then we started our Godot project at 9:30 AM Saturday and worked almost non-stop till 12 PM Sunday (the deadline). We used the Godot Game Engine for our game, Git to collaborate, and Piskel for sprite creation.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into when creating Martian Trail, was coordinating a 5-man team to work on separate tasks and use git to combine our efforts. All 5 of us were not very familiar or not familiar at all with Godot and Git, and it was a steep learning curve. There were several times when a pull request to main created several errors and sunk hours of our time figuring out how to patch up our program again. The main challenge in developing Martian Trail was programming 5 different Martial events: the depiction of them, their effect on the player, and their effect on UI. These events were fundamental to the game loop.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The Slopsmiths are proud of the hard work they put in. We're proud of how the sprites look, and how much we've learned in such a short time. We're proud on our game and that no matter how slow we progressed, we kept on working.

What we learned

We learned how to use git somewhat responsibly, how to build interacting scenes in Godot, how to manage a team, and how to manage time.

What's next for Martian Trail

Although we poured our hearts out into this project, there is much more to be added. Overall, the game needs polishing in several areas, from the audio to the UI design to the game balancing. If we were to work on Martian Trail, we would work on making the game more difficult and more informative. We could also add some audio, that we couldn't quite finish in time.

Built With

• gdscript
• github
• godot
• piskel