Our Brief

Inspiration 🧠

As a team of two, we both agreed that the first hackathons are quite nerve-racking and it is often quite hard to find the right tips and advice on how to approach hacking for the first time. To address this issue we decided to develop Slot Tip. Inspired by the popular creation fruit machine and MLH's birthday we wanted to create a project that made use of both themes.

What it does 💻

Slot Tip is a creation based on pygame that allows users to use their credit to spin the birthday-themed slot machine. If a user gets a match then they are given a useful piece of advice to help/encourage them to partake in their first hackathon. If not then the user can have another go at spinning the slot machine until they run out of credit.

Our features:

• credit that keeps track of a user's score
• a text file that holds tips and messages newcomers can send to reach out to other hackers to team up
• GUI to help user's enjoy the game

The Logistics

How we built it 🧱

We used Figma to visualize our separate ideas of what the game should look like. Once this was done we combined the two to create the final design before developing the app using*Python*. When using Python, we initially created a template to set out the logic of the fruit game machine and then implemented the GUI afterwards into the code using pygame as mentioned.

Here is an image of our Figma journey:

Our Takeaways

Challenges we ran into 😠

We ran into a few logic problems in Python in regards to credit updates during the development of our game. However, with proper debugging and communication we were able to work through these issues - allowing the game to work. We also struggled a bit with time zones which meant that time management was key to the completion of our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 😊

As a team of two consisting of a first-time hacker and an experienced one, we are proud to have shared knowledge between the two of us making the event an enjoyable experience for the whole team. Moreover, as a team, we were able to learn new skills from each other such as navigating hackathons, Figma, and using the pygame library. Additionally, we are very proud to have completed the project in the end.

What we learned 📖

We learned how to work together in a group with a limited time frame to produce a really cool project. We also learned some new languages and were able to develop our CS skills!

What's next for Slot Tips🤷‍♀️

We hope to take this project into the real world to see how it helps first-time hackers. Moreover, we would like to include more tips and tricks to ensure that there is a wide variety of advice a player may receive.

Built With

• python