Mystery at the Hackathon

Inspiration

After working on a text-based adventure game in Team Software project last semester, Andee and Justin were interested in fine tuning the mechanics of the platform. Sam came in as our writer to create the story to show off the behind-the-scenes code. Because we were limited to 36 hours we decided to use the time limitation that would have crippled a full-fledged game and create an interactive short story instead.

What it does

Mystery at the Hackathon tells the story of two students, Taylor and Kevin participating in a Hackathon. The story is told through Taylor's point of view and relies on the keyboard input of the reader to advance the plot.

How we built it

The code for handling keyboard input and using it to advance through the story was written in C# and used to build the short story in Unity.

Challenges we ran into

We didn't come to Wonderhack with a project idea in mind and ran into a lot of incompatibility between the systems we were using. This meant we failed at several other ideas from our brainstorming before we found that the interactive short story had a chance of completion within the time constraints of the Hackathon. We failed fast and failed hard, but we wouldn't have the success we have if we didn't.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The code for the short story was created so that we can use it to create other interactive stories or text based adventure games. The text reading and handling was all designed to be modular.

What we learned

It would have gone a lot smoother for us if we had done some planning ahead. Making sure that we all had the same tools ready to go and had tested our system compatability before we got together to try and begin a hack it would have been a lot easier on us.