Snack Res-Q

Inspiration

The inspiration for this game came from real events from the opening day of KnightHacks. Before the opening ceremony, one of use decided to get a snack from the vending machine in the ENG2 Atrium. When we went to purchase the snack, however, the snack got stuck right before the bottom of the machine. During the night, more and more people starting having the same issue, losing money to the dreaded vending machine. So we decided to make a game to simulate this problem.

What it does

We replicated the design and snacks in the vending machine of the ENG2 Atrium in order to simulate the real world problem. We then made the game based around trying to get the snack that is lodged at the bottom of the machine unstuck using falling snacks that can be chosen and bought by the user. The user will get a set amount of money at the start, however, so they must choose wisely as to what snacks they want to attempt at getting the snack at the bottom unstuck.

How we built it

None of us have had game developing experience before this hackathon, so we decided to learn the Godot software in order to create our game. The Godot software utilizes nodes and child nodes to hold the animations and functionality of each part of the game. Our main node would hold the combination of the other child nodes. The child nodes consisted of HUD functionality, vending machine animations, win conditions, snack spawners, and background animations. The sprites and animations were also created in a software called LibraSprite. Once the functionality of each node was synced with the animations, we made those nodes children of the main node to create a single running game. Of course, we implemented bug fixes and animation tuning along the way before our final submission.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we faced was utilizing the game and art software. The logic of our game was sound, but learning the software for the first time proved to be a tougher task than we had planned. Both Godot, the game software, and LibraSprite, the art software, were completely new to us. Once we figured out the ins and outs of the programs we were using, the only problems we came across were small bugs when running the code and fixing edge cases so that there were no out of bounds inputs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe that the culmination of our submitted product is plenty to be proud of. To be able to create something with lots of behind-the-scenes functionality along with our own sprite/animation style was truly fulfilling to see come to a working model. We are also proud of the project and time management we implemented during the time of the hackathon. We realized during the learning process of the software that we would only have enough time to implement certain things from our original vision. With the variations to the original vision, we submitted a project that has all the main functionality we had hoped for along with some extra polishing.

What we learned

This was our first time participating a hackathon, so we learned more than we could have imagined. Coming into this, we had no idea what to expect, and we ended up learning multiple different softwares, team build, project management, and communication along the way to finishing our rendering of the real life vending machine problem. Furthermore, we attended many workshops during the second day of the competition, so we learned from both the experience and the helpful mentors from KnightHacks.

What's next for Snack Res-Q

The game is only in its beginning stages. Our beginning vision was to have multiple, randomized levels with many different snacks to vend and different combinations of snacks/positions to get unstuck. Our final submission to the hackathon only had one working level, but all the functionality we needed, so we hope to extend our base functionality to those extra levels to meet our original imagining of the game. Along with some animation polishing, we think we could add even more functionality than the current version we uploaded has and we plan to keep working on the project past the hackathon deadline.