NewsGame

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  Picture of main screen

Inspiration

In keeping with a journalism theme I had to create something that would be beneficial to journalism. I do not study journalism and my interest in programming is mostly game design. I didn't see want need journalism would have for a video game at first, but then I figured it could kind of be like newspaper comics. You get the paper to see the comics, but you may notice the front page news is interesting so you read on. This game would ideally work the same. You spend a few minutes on your lunch break to see some major news headlines while playing a little game. The nature of the game might cause people who don't regularly consume news to be more aware, as well as, become a little more skeptical when they are presented with a sensational headline. This game does not combat existing fake news or accurately teachers the player to spot it, but rather it is there to get them used to digging a little deeper into the news they see.

What it does

You are first presented with three headlines. Two are real headlines from BBC News, the other one is a fake headline that I made up. You can select a headline and get a little more information about that headline, although it is still probably luck if you correctly guess which headline is the fake news. There is a politics section, business section, and science section with a little randomization of what their contents might be. After you win or lose, you can view the BBC webpage with a "source" button that appears attempted news sections.

How I built it

I built it in Unity. To learn the skills I needed to do that I would look up a tutorial to figure out the syntax or specific functions I have to call to get the effect I was thinking of. Some things I knew how to do with my previous tinkering with Unity and general programming, but there lots of new things for me to grapple with.

Challenges I ran into

It is really hard to get the headlines to be of a presentable font size on a phone. I had to double the size of the buttons in order to make it tolerable. I would of like to have the phone pull popular articles off of the internet and present them autonomously, but I believe that requires networking skills that I just didn't have the time to learn. I also wanted to design it as a game that you play daily, but I don't yet know how to save play data or update it externally.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is the first time I put a game on my phone, and probably the second time I have made a functional game.

What I learned

I learned about developing a game for an Android phone and how to use Unity to do that.

What's next for NewsGame

It probably will not evolve past its current state, but it helped me further my knowledge.

Built With

• c#
• unity