Inspiration

Who would have thought that sipping matcha at a friend's place with a balcony view of the Terry Fox field while attempting to come up with an original idea for Storm Hacks 2026 could unite all of the team's brain cells together? Though we struggled immensely at first, we created a game where the main character's goal is to become the ultimate "performative male". Our silly little characters and creatures all took inspirations from the "mascots" of the SFU Burnaby Campus.

What it does

Simon's Adventure is a 2D platformer where Simon is forced to collect all the items that he has lost around the familiar places of SFU Burnaby campus in order to find himself again. During his adventure, he has interesting encounters with Terry the Fox, Tim the Raccoon, a bear?, and C-B-U student. The story involves funny, yet emotional, story telling that gives the readers insights into Simon and why he is doing this.

How we built it

The game was built using GameMaker engine and Resprite for sprite creation.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was coming up with an original ideas among a team where half of us are not in Computing Science and do not have any coding background. It was undeniably challenging throughout the entire process as we continuously went back to square one due to unoriginal thoughts or lack of confidence in our ideas. Furthermore, we struggled under the time constraint to create a fully-developed game from scratch, even if we gave it our best to complete it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite those setbacks and uncontrollable variables, we managed to brainstorm the structure of our game together and come to a satisfying agreement. Two of our less experienced coders teamed up to write authentic mono-/dialogues for our characters, incorporating interesting traits to each of them. The rest of us split the work into two main tasks: sprite design/creation and coding. It was interesting to see that we all brought with us various skill sets to the table; which created an incredibly fun, enjoyable, and supportive environment for all of us!

What we learned

Not only did each of us have the opportunity to hone our skills (coding, story telling, pixel art sprite design, etc.), but we also learnt numerous topics from different domains and truly had the chance to get out of our comfort zones. We believe that each of us will walk out this hackathon with even more knowledge and confidence.

What's next for Simon's Adventure

We truly TRULY love(d) the world that we have built. Each character is so individually unique that it's really hard not to get too attached. After the hackathon, we would love to get together, polish our game even more, and complete it with all the necessary features that we had brainstormed from our drawing board.