print("Hello Blob's World")

Title Menu
Teaching
Multiple Choice
Coding Question
Flying to a new planet

Inspiration

As college students, we’ve noticed that the beginning of our coding journey was not a smooth experience and required a high learning curve. On top of that, learning how to code seemed intimidating. We thought of what would’ve engaged us in learning, and decided to introduce coding to children as a stepping stone into the computer science field. Starting from the basics at a young age will curate interest in adolescence and make learning and creating higher level programs easier if they decide to pursue coding as one of their interests in the future.

What it does

print("Hello Blob's World) is a visual novel game that teaches coding in Python to children in a fun, interactive, and adventurous way. The game begins with a sequence with our main character, Blob, crashing their spaceship on an unknown planet. Through various questions and challenges, Blob is able to fight aliens and find parts needed to repair their spaceship to make their journey back home. These questions often involve multiple choice and fill in the blank coding questions about Python. The game will teach users step-by-step basics of Python and how to implement simple functions.

How we built it

Using Python and Ren’Py, we developed a visual novel game following the adventures of Blob and his journey back home. We created the characters ourselves by drawing in Procreate and photoshopped various pixelated backgrounds to pull together the game frames. Text was encoded onto these frames using Ren’Py as the visual novel engine that uses Python as a base language.

Challenges we ran into

We had a difficult time finalizing the storyboard and what direction we wanted to take the game in terms of educating our user. Additionally, it took longer than expected to put together the game frames with the drawings, photoshopped images, and text positioned how we envisioned. Debugging and encoding the game itself to ensure we had a functioning product took the majority of our work time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re most proud of being able to have developed a game within the short time frame we were given. With most of us with little to no game development experience, being able to pull together a game within a day was a big accomplishment to us. We learned new softwares and different ways of using coding languages we were already familiar with. Other accomplishments include implementing user input and small animations into the game and creating the art for our game.

What we learned

Originally, none of us were familiar with Ren’Py or creating a visual novel game in general. However, through the process of making this game, we were able to familiarize ourselves with the software and learned different uses for Python rather than the back-end use we were used to. Additionally, we learned how to use photoshop to put together game frames with our drawings. Prior to developing our game, we learned more about storyboarding and user flow.

What's next for print("Hello Blob's World")

We hope to expand the concept of the game to include mini games as rewards for answering questions correctly, and eventually, build in a reward system to earn coins so that the user can customize Blob. Additionally, we also want to turn the game into a RPG-based (role-playing game) game to further immerse individuals in the lore of the game while keeping them engaged in the learning process. We want to make our game as interactive as we can, so other features we want to implement are: