Inspiration
As students, we always have tons of task to do every day. With every year it seems to feel like we lose more motivation to do our daily tasks, especially house chores or anything not related to school. We thought that if it was a game, it would make it easier to do our daily tasks. It would give us motivation to do our tasks.
What it does
It is a suppose mobile software that creates a cat for you to take care of. There is a generated energy bar for each cat and slowly decreases as time goes by. When we complete tasks, you gain more energy for your cat. If you wait too long though, the cat will get too tired and the energy bar will deplete completely. You can create tasks with different levels of difficulty which gives different amounts of energy to your cat when you complete them.
How we built it
Our project began with a Pygame template from an official source, serving as the foundation for our game. Each team member had distinct tasks to bring the project to life. Naz hand-drew each image and converted them into PNGs, working alongside Katie as the front-end developers. Together, they designed the backgrounds, graphics, and various in-game icons. The game featured two main backgrounds—the main area and the closet—along with an achievement page, which we, unfortunately, didn't have time to implement. Jade and Lindsay focused on the back-end development, implementing core game mechanics. One of the first major features was the happiness bar, which included a graphical display along with functions to get, set, increase, and decrease its value. A clock system was also introduced to gradually decrease happiness at set intervals (which were sped up in the demo to showcase functionality). If the happiness bar dropped below 40, the cat’s expression changed to a sad cat. 3 classes were made for the buttons, 2 of which were clickable and interactive. Given more time, we would have expanded the system to increase coins upon task completion and allow players to earn items after reaching certain coin milestones.
Challenges we ran into
All of us are used to coding primarily on our local machines, it made GitHub pull and push requests a fun challenge when merge issues came up. It took an acknowledgement that communication way key to a project's success, and made us learn the importance of evaluating each other's code before making a change. In summary, clearness in our code and comments made us understand how teams are supposed to operate for work and personal projects.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team is new to using pygame, yet even so, we have learned new techniques to learn how user interfaces are created. Specifically, we are proud of how our application is user-friendly, all functionalities are clear to the user and the graphical interface is easy to navigate.
What we learned
Throughout our education, we have learned the theoretical practices of Object-Oriented programming, but have yet to applied it in practicality. Here, while Python isn't necessarily an Object-Oriented language, we have applied encapsulation and getter/setter functions for a team of programmers to accurately understand eachother's code. Not only did this make the creation process smooth, but it enforced basic principles on a higher level.
What's next for Pet-Tropica
Pet-Tropica will expand to include a function for users to input their own tasks dynamically, additionally complete the functionality of our store and a coin-system for users to feel satisfied when they complete their tasks. Our graphics will continue to improve and hopefully move to app services in the future.
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