Pokemon Viridi

Starting Town
Route 1
First City
Route 2
Final City

Inspiration

We were inspired by our group's collective like for Pokémon as we all love the games, and since this is the first hackathon for 2/3 of our members, we decided that we should do something fun and unique that combines our interests, like making a short little Pokémon game!

What it does

The game provides a hands-on approach towards the desire to help the environment, what better way for people to understand how helpful saving the environment is than by trying to stop those who hurt it with friends made along the way?

How we built it

We built it using RPG Maker, which lets us code the game using Ruby. We got our assets from a Pokémon mod for RPG Maker called Pokémon Essentials, but we also made custom sprites specific to the game, such as the polluted grass, polluted trees, trash on the ground, etc.

Challenges we ran into

We were having a lot of trouble figuring out a story that was small enough to fit into a 5-minute presentation, but not too short to where the game wasn't too enjoyable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how we were able to make do with a roughly ~20-minute-long game. It's great that the game is actually in a state where it can be enjoyable, and we're happy to be able to achieve something so unique in such a short amount of time,

What we learned

We learned that the best way to make do with what we're give, and that our first vision isn't necessarily our final product. For example, we had to remove the aspect of catching Pokémon and instead have static encounters for the Pokémon we can use, and we learned that having to make decisions like that is critical to game development.

What's next for Pokémon Viridi

It would be very fun to continue making this game, and we might even plan to do so! We would have to tweak some parts, for example moving and adding characters around to make the game feel more like a full game. We also plan to have more custom sprites to further diversify the landscape, alongside potentially adding a fog effect to fully show air pollution. Despite that, this is still a very promising demo for Pokémon Viridi!