Pollution Pandemonium

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  Thumbnail

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  Win screen

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  Start screen

Inspiration

We were inspired by games such as Reigns, Cookie Clicker, and Plague Inc., and so we decided to make something that takes something from each of these games and puts an environmental twist on it.

What it does

Pollution Pandemonium plays as a text-based adventure game that uses a choose your own adventure style of progression. The game has a pollution progress bar from 0-100%, and a money indicator as well. The player can buy things that increase money production, and things that lower the pollution rate. The goal is to reach 0% pollution, in which case the player wins and is met with a congratulations screen. If the player reaches 100% pollution, they lose the game. We implemented a secret ending as well, so try to find it yourself as you play!

How we built it

We utilized Object Oriented Programming with structs and multiple files, alongside pointer arrays, to make the code more efficient and writable. We spent the first day of the Hackathon purely on the theory of the game and making a game plan for the coding process. We divided our priorities into needs and wants and then created a cooperative Repl (an online compiler that allows synchronous editing), with which we coded our project. After that, we uploaded the files from Repl to Github.

Challenges we ran into

Well, we ran into a few segmentation faults that had to do with accidentally walking off the pointer array, the destructor for the struct that contained the pointer array accidentally was programmed wrong initially as well. We also ran into a problem with item descriptions and had to go through our code and remove any recursive calls to functions. We also wanted to make a visual GUI, but decided that we didn't have enough time to learn a whole new API, and settled for a console game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a fun display for a text-based game and are very proud that we managed to finish it on time, given this is our first Hackathon for all 3 of us. We are also proud of the "fun facts" section we put into the top of the display, which told the user environmental facts to spread awareness about them.

What we learned

We learned cooperative coding skills, brainstorming tactics, modulated code, how to debug code and effectively playtest our game. We learned how to clear the console and how to create a balanced game system with multiple variables.

What's next for Pollution Pandemonium

If we want to keep it going, the first thing we would probably do would be to create a visual GUI and add more creative events. Next, we would add achievements, quests, and unlocks. We would also likely create separate levels, hard modes, a save/load feature, sprite arts, and a sound track. Depending, we could also add a boss fight at the end of levels.

Built With

• c++
• github
• replit