On the Line

Inspiration

We got the inspiration to create a game about student experience from our own experiences, the collective general student experience brought together a series of ideas, and a lot of experiences to capture inside a game with a lot of symbolic meaning.

What it does

The game captures the life of a student who has gotten enrolled into the university for the first time, and had realized that the university was closed because of COVID-19, so we go through each day of the student's life, attending lectures, doing homework repeatedly. We keep into account the happiness, fatigue and their academic standings while the player plays out a student's life.

How we built it

Since we were aiming for the bounty prizes of building our project entirely in scratch, that's what we did. We came together, gathered all our ideas, our stories to be told in the game, and our experiences. Then we merged them all together and started the development in scratch.

Challenges we ran into

As soon as we started to build in scratch, we realized this is going to be very challenging, as none of our group members had actually used scratch before, it was very new. We decided to switch up the platform and try using Unity instead because the capabilities of Unity were outmatched compared to Scratch, but that didn't work either since only one member from the group knew only a little about Unity, and it was a very steep learning curve to make a small game. We initially envisioned special graphics systems to represent the mood and inner thoughts, but the scratch interface did not have an easy system to implement. As a result, we had to rely on changing the sprites directly. Another problem was that our code would get largely extensive if we included all of the events per day, so we simplified it to be a simple zoom meet per day.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

we are proud that we created a game that could simulate our past campus experience. Also that we made an actual game that is capable of simulating realistic events through direct interaction. Ultimately, we are proud that we worked as a team to bring together our skills in this activity.

What we learned

Since it was the first hackathon for all of our group members, we learned a lot about hackathon and teamwork. Making a program/game in such a limited time was a challenging task, but we were able to complete it because of the teamwork, because we had collaborated together very well with little conflicts. This not only made us realize how challenging a hackathon could be, but it also made us realize how fun a hackathon really is. It is all about teamwork, and how the thoughts of group members brings together a large project.

What's next for On the Line

On the Line in scratch was just a start to a project that may one day be fully completed. Our groups goal is to capture the students' experiences going through rough times and simulate it in a impactful manner. The project isn't complete until the experience of many students is brought together into one big story driven game which will allow others to view the experience of the students through their perspective, and know the challenges each student goes through each day.

Built With

• scratch