Inflation Line

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  Inflation Line gamplay

Inspiration

Real estate data sets are usually very dry and uninteresting, so we sought to creatively visualize it in an fun and engaging way.

What it does

The player can move around with the arrow or WASD keys and press space or E to interact with houses to get the buy/sell menu and prices while dodging slimes. The goal is to get slimed as few times as possible and acquire all the real estate!

How I built it

The clientside game is javascript/html5 canvas, no libraries. The backend is an express app written in nodejs running on gcp. The database the backend hits is a Mongodb atlas instance running on Google cloud platform.

Challenges we ran into

We had an issue with the logic for drawing roads horizontal and vertically. The bug appeared to be in one part of the code, but after a couple hours of passively pondering it and coming back to it every now and then, we realized it was right under our noses all along!

We had an artist but she ended up going on a very complicated mission to get AAAA batteries for her drawing pen that died right as she started and ended up taking several ubers and getting in a car accident. She is ok.

We also had to overcome the problem of getting a good usable real estate dataset for the game. We ended up needing to write a tool to convert lat/long to street name and number using the Google Maps api.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are really happy with how the sliming mechanic turned out and how fluid it feels as well as the general outcome of the project. The visual appearance despite not having any art assets ended up being alright.

What we learned

Always bring a backup battery for your drawing tools, and always be ready to change plans when things go wrong!

What's next for Inflation Line

We would like to get actual art assets and maybe improve on and complicate the town a bit better. Maybe add some trees and nicer looking and more complicated roads.

Warning

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Built With

• domain.com
• express.js
• gcp
• html5
• javascript
• mongodb
• mongodbatlas
• node.js