Return to Arda

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  Return to Arda Logo

Our Inspiration

Our inspiration stemmed from our love for trivia and 90s video games. We blended these two into the space theme by creating a trivia game testing on quirky facts to guide an alien back to their home planet.

Space is a vast topic and one can never fully understand it. Keeping this in mind, we based our game on educating people and spreading the love for the galaxy.

What it does

On Return to Adra, users follow an Adranian, Eru, on their journey home. Users need to answer questions on intergalactic facts and each right answer gets Eru one step closer to home. A wrong answer results in the termination of the game and Eru is back at square one. The aim of the game is to improve one's knowledge of the space while boosting their curiosity.

How we built it

We used Unity's WebDL game development software to develop the game in C#. The various levels were designed by deploying distinct in-built UI elements and graphics fashioned by us. In addition to the displays, the animations were also custom coded to make the interface lively.

Initially, multiple prototypes were sketched on paper to properly understand the functionality of the game and make it user interactive. The final blueprint was then used to base the game on.

All the graphics ranging from the Asteroid option blocks to the background were designed in GraphicGale and Aseprite. The tailor-made logo was generated on Placeit and Canva to further enhance the game recognition in a public platform.

The video was made using Google slides and iMovies and posted on YouTube.

Challenges we ran into

We are all absolute beginners in game development and the software used. A lot of time was invested in selecting the most appropriate software and learning it as much as we could in the given time to develop our game.

We ran across multiple challenges in using Unity to make a game of this scale. The scaling and transition between scenes were challenging. Creating the right graphics in GraphicsGale and Aesprite and embedding them into the game was an add-on task. We created multiple versions of the graphics and texts with various backgrounds until we settled on the current versions on a transparent background.

Once we were able to build the basic version of the game, we decided to plug-in sound and animations to the player sprites' motion. Here, we faced an issue in making the animations smooth and increasing the overall aesthetics of the game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We all have been playing games since our childhood, this was our first attempt to make a game. So we are proud of the game interface and design. The premise was the highlight of the game! Submitting a fully functioning game was the highest accomplishment we are proud of.

What we learned

Overall, the whole 48 hours spent on creating this game was a learning process for us.

We built on our team-building and collaboration skills throughout the project with constant communication and leveraging personal strengths in task division.

We learnt how to utilize Unity, GraphicsGale and Aseprite. We started from scratch in each software and worked our way up learning different elements needed for the game.

To conclude, we learnt how to create a beginner game with a neat user-interface in this hackathon.

What's next for Return to Adra

In the future, we hope to have more levels and animations in Return to Adra. We'd also want to make it accessible to the general public by adding to PlayStore and AppStore. Furthermore, we would want to make the overall game design and graphics more powerful to increase user interaction and retention.

Built With

• aseprite
• c#
• canva
• graphicsgale
• python
• unity