Orbit!

Inspiration

Kaylie - I was the designer and asset collector for this project. I took a lot of inspiration from the sci-fi media that was around when I was a kid. There are references to things like Dune, Star Wars, The Avengers, and Doctor Who in the code files, and some of it pops up it the game itself. See if you can find any! Josiah - Daniel provided the idea for Orbit. It was inspired by Space Invaders, Nova Drift, and the real-time strategy game genre.

What it does

Josiah - Orbit is a action-packed strategy game where the player must pay attention to the incoming waves of enemies while strategizing how to gather and spend resources.

How we built it

Kaylie - I was decently experienced in Graphic Design from courses in high school, but there was still a lot I didn't know, including how to code (which sounds like something necessary!). I used some generative ai such as Gemini and ChatGPT with drawn reference photos to get the sprites for the game and then edit manually in Pixlr E. Josiah - We built Orbit in the Godot engine, and we used GitHub for version control. We spent lots of time looking at documentation, and got some assistance from various AI Models.

Challenges we ran into

Kaylie - Unfortunately, about 4 hours into Friday came the realization that the editing software would only allow 3 free exports per 24 hours. Which is a problem if you have a lot of sprites to edit. That sent me on a hunt for another photo editor, which was Photopea, and so I had to relearn how to use some of the tools and how to make do without some of the tools I had grown used to in PixlrE. Josiah - During the development of Orbit we faced challenges with GitHub conflicts, time crunch, and lack of sleep. Probably the biggest challenge we overcame was an issue with sprite collisions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of all the hard work we put into this weekend. We approached the event as a team that had not worked together much before, but we have done a great job.

What we learned

Kaylie - As the asset collector I also had the job of finding and mixing audio files for the game, and for the automated warning voice I used the elevenlabs text to speech tool. That was also interesting in learning how to use the different tone words and how best to make the computer say things the way I wanted it to say. Eventually, I even got the chance to learn some coding! I googled for some instructions about how to attach sound to sprite, and used gemini to check my code for me. Nothing has exploded yet, so I guess I didn't do that bad. Josiah - The biggest lessons that we learned this weekend were teamwork and perseverance. We also gained some knowledge in Godot and the process of programming with AI.

What's next for Orbit!

Orbit will probably receive a final polish, and then be a treasure that gets passed around at gatherings. It will live on as knowledge gained, and the things we have learned will empower us to improve our future projects.