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  Vaccine

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  Pill

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  Omicron

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  Game Over Screen

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  Beta

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  Hand sanitizer

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  Delta

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  Vulnerable ghost

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  Alpha

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  Mask

Mc(Hack)fee Antivirus 2022 - Pan(demic)-Man

✍️ Project Description

Our project is a spin on the classic '80s arcade game: Pac-Man. In our spoof, Pac-Man is being chased by COVID-19 variants: Alpha (Pink), Beta (Beta), Delta (Orange), and Omicron (Green). Classic game pieces ('sprites') like ghosts, power pellets, and fruits have been replaced by things we are all now unfortunately familiar with: COVID-19 variants, face-masks, vaccine syringes, hand sanitizer, and more.

💡Inspiration

This project was inspired by our desire to dive into the world of game development, an area our team was completely unfamiliar with. We approached this hackathon with learning being the main end goal of our project. The idea for the game itself was, in no small part, inspired by the realities of the current pandemic and of course, Pac-Man.

⚙️ How we built it

The game was built on the Unity game development platform using C# and is largely based on a tutorial by Zigorous (YouTube, Github). We would like to credit the original author and emphasize that we approached this hackathon purely as a learning experience. The game was compiled with webGL and is served using DigitalOcean.

After following the tutorial and learning the ropes of Unity and C#, we were able to craft our own creative twists on the classic game. The main differences include

• Custom animations for the viral ghosts (they are so cute! )
• Independent animation of of Pacdemic-Man death scene
• The pills, syringe, and hand sanitizer required individual function implementations in C# for the "ghost" reactions to the power-ups and different activation effects
• Fun(?), appropriately themed game over text was added

The sprites were custom made by our team just for this project, see them in all of their glory below!

🚧 Challenges we ran into

The Unity platform has a big learning curve, especially since no one on our team was familiar with C#. We ran into quite a few roadblocks trying to find settings and functions we had never used before.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're definitely very proud of the game as a whole and the creativity that went into making it possible. Getting the animations of the variants and Pac-Man working within the traditional framework were especially satisfying, as well as being able to code the custom functions.

🧠 What we learned

We learned a lot more about the game development process, the Unity platform, and the rules of Pac-Man. The physics and logical frameworks behind the movements of Pac-Man and ghosts was particularly fun to learn about and code!

🎮 Gameplay

• Like the original Pac-Man game, the goal is to accumulate as many points as possible
• Gameplay begins with any key press
• Move pacdemic-man with the W A S D keys or up down left right arrow keys
• Edible variants move at half-speed

And at least for some of us: that game development is not a career path we'll be pursuing.

👟 Next steps for Pan(demic)-Man

We'd like to stray farther from the traditional Pac-Man gameplay by introducing new challenges like "curfew" or "closed borders" to the game. We would also like to implement different items at different levels, as well as more complex strategic placement and timing for the effects. Lastly, we would like to make the game slightly more educational and include resources for COVID-19 information, safety, and support.

Project made with ❤️ by Nathalie, Elinor and Alex.

Built With

• c#
• html
• unity
• webgl