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Play the life of a bullied schoolboy
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Do activities to have fun
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Face bullies
Inspiration
We were inspired by the #HackHarassment challenge! We knew we wanted to make a game but we didn't have a theme a head of time. Building a game for a good cause was something we could all get excited about!
What it does
Messaging Matters is part game part story. It takes the player through the life of a boy that is being cyber bullied. The boy starts his day at full happiness and despite his best efforts to stay happy by doing fun activities the cyber bullying he experience drains his happiness levels to zero. The game ends with some statistics about cyber bullying today. We hope the game leaves a somber but lasting message about the effects of cyber bullying
How we built it
We had programmers of various levels of experience but we all knew Java so that was the language of choice. We decided to not use any game frameworks or engines and built the game from the ground up. We did all the art work by hand using an online sprite editor and Gimp.
Challenges we ran into
We had plenty of challenges along the way to learn from. We spent a long time building a GUI in JavaFx that was eventually scrapped because it become to complex. We also were all first time hackathoners and game developers so there was a lot of challenge around quickly writing flexible code that would make it easy to add things to the game.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we got a finished product in the 24 hours.
What we learned
We learned a lot about making GUI applications in Java. We also learned to collaborate and write more flexible code.
What's next for Messaging Matters
The Messaging Matters team is looking forward to future hackathons to get to keep hacking and learning!
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