Inspiration
I was inspired to create something about marine life! There are lots of environmental problems we face today: climate change, melting ice caps, etc. But, I personally feel like the ecosystems underwater are most directly effected by these changes. I wanted to do something to educate others and bring awareness to these issues!
What it does
Ocean Perils is a choose your own adventure type game where the player acts as a fish navigating various obstacles underwater. They can decide where to swim based on quick previews of the area around them. After selecting a direction, they'll get information on the area they swam to.
If they swam near a pollutant or marine threat, they get information on the particular threat and why it's harmful to fish. The game will end, but they can choose to start over and make the "correct" choice to keep playing.
If a player successfully avoids an obstacle, they'll be introduced to a new underwater habitat. Specifically, my game includes a coral reef, kelp forest, and an underwater cave. These features show the diversity that exists under the sea which is at risk if people don't take action.
How I built it
I built my program in repl.it and I used HTML/CSS/JS to create it. I also made my own images and GIFs that appear in the game.
Challenges I ran into
I've built text choose-your-own adventure games before using Python, but I wanted to try incorporating images and build a web version of this game genre. I wasn't sure how I could do this at first. I thought I could use links to a bunch of different webpages, but that seemed inconvenient and I didn't want to create a bunch of extra files if that wasn't necessary. Eventually, I found that I could disable scrolling with a few CSS tags and arrange different "stages" or "days" on a single file and use IDs to move through them.
Another funny challenge I encountered was finding a way to fit in the "space potato" theme. As it turned out, potato production and space debris were actually involved in real oceanic threats so I was able to smoothly incorporate those elements into my project with a bit of extra research.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud of making my first web choose-your-own adventure game! It was pretty fun to create and I learned a lot of new things!
What I learned
I actually learned a lot about marine life and how at risk so many species and ecosystems are. Beyond content though, I learned how to make a lot of new effects for buttons, creating bubbles in the background, and mechanisms I can use for the choose-your-own adventure concept.
What's next for Ocean Perils
I'd like to add more choices and perhaps add a resources page with organizations people can reach out to if they'd like to learn more!
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