Inspiration
General Inspiration A combination of 3AM thoughts and real-life experiences led us to come up with Pay to Play. Everyone has been in the situation where a restaurant party fights for the check, why would you let your friends pay?? With the developers being on both the customer and server side of this commonly hilarious scene, we decided to recreate this adrenaline inducing experience through a casual game.
Development Inspiration Because we intended for the game to be simple and fun, there were many simple C# Unity features and functions we used to implement the mechanics. RNG to determine which hand is moving, booleans to track the state of each hand, simple and effective! Perfect for a casual game.
Design Choices The environment design choices reflect a typical Chinese restaurant because it is an environment that our developers, as Asian Americans are familiar with. None of us are unfamiliar to watching our elders fight for the check at the end of a hearty meal.
What it does
As per the experience, the game showcases a check in the middle of the screen with hands holding credit cards around it. The hands surrounding the check will start to move towards the check to pay for the bill, getting faster as the game continues, and it's the players job to click the hands to swat them away for as long as they can.
How we built it
We build this game using Unity 2D in C# for the development and UI implementation, ProCreate to create our sprites and backgrounds, PixaBay for sound effects and background music, and light usage of ChatGPT Open AI to help us debug.
Challenges we ran into
Time constraints and priority management was the biggest challenge we ran into this year. Usually our team has 4 developers, but this year we were down to 3 due to one of our members having to do an alternate project to prepare for life after graduation, and overall more time to commit to the hackathon. Furthermore, the remaining three had other important events and priorities to attend to throughout the hacking period such as meetings, Capstone projects, alternate game development projects, and even A Cappella performances.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite our alternate activities and time constraints, we are proud of getting a finished and working product for the last WICHacks we can all participate in together.
What we learned
Over the years we've participated at WICHacks, we feel as though we finally learned how to scale our projects properly to the time we've been given to complete the project. We've struggled the past few years with this skill, always over scoping due to a lack of accurate perception of what we can actually accomplish in 24 hours. This year, we finally learned our lesson.
More importantly we also learned that we're going to mis WICHack-ing with each other :(((( (two of our members are graduating this Spring, and another next Fall)
What's next for Pay to Play
We've thought about increasing the difficulty by adding in different game mechanics other than the speed increasing as the time goes on, as well as alternate stylistic stretch goals as well. Some of these ideas include:
- Spinning the Lazy Susan randomly to change the placement of the check -Power ups (ex: "Food Coma" to slow down a hand, "Wasted" to make the path of the hand shaky and less direct)
- Creating a micro transaction system where playing costs the player an amount of game currency refreshed every few hours. Furthermore, daily challenges and beating a previous high score will give the player rewards that can be used to purchase skin packs to alter the visual appearance of the game to reflect different types of restaurants.
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