Charlie's Cosmic Conquest

The Story

In the midst of the Space Race, young space fanatic Charlie doesn't know very much about who communists are or even where they are from. All he knows is what he has overheard -- communists are the bad guys, and they cannot reach the moon before the United States does.

Why?

Well, obviously the moon must be hiding something. Why else would they want to go there?

In his wildest dreams, the USSR has reached the moon and discovered an advanced alien civilization with futuristic technology capable of wiping out their greatest enemies. In a blend of old and new, from blasters to laser swords to time-travelling cyborg Stalin, the only thing preventing the fall of the United States is Charlie himself.

Inspiration

We honestly just wanted to build a game, using Hacklahoma as an excuse to finally work with Unity. None of us had any prior experience with Unity or game development, especially not in any team environments, so we wanted to take this opportunity to experiment. Charlie's story started out as some CS majors making jokes and having fun that turned into a full blown narrative.

What It Does

You will have fun. Cyborg Stalin demands your compliance.

How Its Made

Unity (C#), GitHub, paint.net

Challenges We Faced

As true beginners in Unity and our only experience with GitHub being from Dr. Maiti's Java 2 class, we ran into several learning curves piecing together how these tools worked and how to have them communicate together effectively. GitHub and Unity really don't like each other, especially when a team is all editing the same scene, and we faced several setbacks of version files not matching up. We learned how to branch a repository and ensure that the files remain error free, so as to not cause problems when working together.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

GitHub is a pain to restructure, but we are glad we were able to work with the mentors to learn some of the best troubleshooting techniques that will save us headaches in the future. We are also glad to experiment with Unity for the first time to create a cohesive game with completely original assets as a team project. Even though we had to leave out a few planned features, we are all still extremely happy with what we built in the time we had, and that we honestly had a great time while doing it. Besides, who else has an original 1950s RoboStalin in their video game?

What we learned

GitHub, although powerful and amazing when things go right, is a pain in the butt to get correct on multiple machines. In the future, we'll ensure that one member of the team will always be the RepoMaster and has full control of the pushing. In addition, we learned how to use the majority of Unity. Our game, although simple, utilizes nearly every important aspect of Unity, from scene switching to collision detecting, along with smooth character flipping. Through trial and error and even more errors, and with help from our mentors, we're proud of how far we've gotten and even more proud of how far we could get with more time!