Mousehunter

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  Start

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  Gameplay

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  End

Inspiration

Hawks and owls are susceptible to poisoning by rodenticides (rodent pesticides). Raptors may not die immediately after eating a poisoned rodent, but they may bleed to death if given enough doses. A study published by a veterinarian found that anticoagulant rodenticides were detected in 86% of red-tailed hawks, barred owls, eastern screech-owls, and great horned owls to a wildlife clinic between 2006 and 2010 (Bell,2015)

I am a proud member of the Audubon Student Chapter at UMD, a birdwatching and conservation club that wants to erect nest boxes for raptors on campus. However, we found out that UMD uses rodenticides widely, so we want to investigate this and possibly convince campus authorities to remove the rodent traps.

What it does

Mousehunter is a game that simulates the life of a barn owl raising its young. As the owl, you must feed five healthy mice to your family of three owlets. The main challenge of the game is avoiding the poisoned mice, which are visually indistinguishable from healthy ones except for their slow movement and lack of a response to the owl character. Use the return key to click through the introduction page, and use the arrow keys to control your owl character. The owl will automatically pick up the first mouse it touches. Deliver the mice to your nest in the window of the barn.

How I built it

I coded Mousehunter in Python and used the pygame library to display graphics and process user input. The graphics were hand-drawn using Pixilart. Each sprite has its own class, and interactions between sprites are regulated in the Game class. An event loop controls game flow.

Challenges I ran into

1. Increasing the complexity: At first, I focused on creating a smaller version of Mousehunter that only involved the owl hunting and consuming the mice itself. However, I realized the game would not be very interesting, so I changed the goal of the game to raising a family of owls.
2. Deciding how to program the poisoned mice: I considered color-coding the poisoned mice but decided that this would make the game less realistic.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am very glad that the owl graphics turned out well! In addition, the owl-mouse interactions required some thought; at first, I included a "release" option that would allow the owl to drop the mouse, but I removed this function later.

What I learned

Mousehunter is a test of my knowledge of pygame! I worked on a previous game over the course of two months, watching tutorials and learning the basics of the library. Although I used similar tactics and organization this time around, creating Mousehunter forced me to condense the development process into about eight hours, increasing my familiarity with pygame and my understanding of basic game structure.

What's next for Mousehunter

1. Introducing more complexity: The owl may need to protect the nest from predators or avoid hunters.
2. Adding music
3. Adding clearer directions and background information about rodenticide poisoning

Built With

• pixilart
• pycharm
• pygame
• python