P.I.E.

Which one is harder - to learn Spanish, or become a beloved President? Try it out yourself!

Comment

Inspiration

Our inspiration were the recent elections that went down in the USA and the month of november being filled with historical milestones and celebrations for the Latvians, remembering how our country came to be. We made this game thinking of Jānis Čakste, the first president of Latvia, we concluded that it would be fitting for the game to involve politics and speaking to a nation in some way. And another aspect we wanted to include was Spanish, because our whole team has studied it at some point.

What it does

This game provides an interactive way to learn Spanish in a stimulating environment, while providing instant feedback.
Gameplay - When starting the game you are offered a choice in the difficulty of the game (beginner, intermediate, pro).
The player is a president of a country and is visiting Spain, and has to give a speech in the nation’s native language. The player has the opportunity to get familiar with a text on a note - in the “beginner” level, it is just three words; in the “intermediate” - a sentence; in the “pro” level - 4 sentences. Through some unanticipated circumstances the note gets destroyed and the player has to reconstruct the speech (finish some words, write in missing letters etc.). The time is limited and is running out. If the answers are right, the crowd is happy and cheers, the player gets some more time; if not, the crowd gets angry. There is a way to get hints - to ask the bodyguards by pressing space, though it will cost some time…
By playing this game, the player learns new words as well as their spelling, usage in the context and the meaning of whole sentences.

How we built it

We brainstormed, had many ideas and concepts, but ultimately landed on one idea. After that we divided the tasks and leaned on each of our own strengths to create the game. The whole time 2 people were writing the code and testing it, and the 3rd person was working on the designs and visual aspects.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered lots of different challenges because we are not really experienced in game development. The main problems that we had to deal with were figuring out how to write the code correctly and fix the bugs, so our vision could come true.
Another big challenge was not overeating the cookies that were kindly provided by the organizers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We (partially) finished the game! And had a lot of fun along the way!
This is our first hackathon and we developed a fully functioning game. It is very engaging and looks quite good for the given time to create it. We are proud of our accomplishment. We are also happy that even with the amount of work we had to do, we managed to participate in the entertainment activities and have fun with other participants.

What we learned

In general, we learned A LOT. As a team, we have improved our communication, learnt how to understand each other in 4 languages and how to find a compromise, regarding the idea.
Some personal lessons:
Amanda - learnt how game development works; how to perform better under pressure, as well as how to draw different backgrounds and work in inkscape.
Ilja - learnt new skills (using OOP in gamedev); how to sleep in a chair.
Nika - learnt how to use pygame (with no previous experience); how to inflate a mattress without a pump.

What's next for P.I.E.

There are many possible improvements to our project that we couldn’t implement because of the time limitation.
We could implement different levels (as of right now we only have one playable level, which is the pro one) we could add different categories of language tasks, like putting the words in the correct order, finding mistakes, writing in whole words, not just a couple of letters.
Then, AI could be integrated, to get more diverse sentences.
It is also possible to create a way to choose different settings for the game - right now, it provides political lines, but the possibilities are endless, for example, classroom, a date or a shop. Customising the character is also on our list of things to add, some details are already created, but we were short on time for implementing it into our game.
One more thing we could improve with more time and skills, is the animations. It would be possible to create more moving aspects and elements of the game that right now are static.

Share this project:

Updates