Inspiration
When our team sat down to brainstorm ideas for hack_cade_2, a common theme that we talked about was how we wanted to make a game that would take us back and remind us of some of our happiest moments growing up! Two games that had a massive impact on shaping this project are Temple Run and Subway Surfers. While in essence, they have a similar plot (running away from the person chasing you), both, in their rights, offered a different user playing experience - Temple Run being the wild pixilated arcade game to Subway Surfers being colourful and polished, yet the result was the game, countless memories. Our project takes a lot of pointers from these games and comes up with a simple yet exciting android application.
What it does
Space Cadet, like the games mentioned above, is an arcade-style endless runner simulation. In this game, the user gets to control our colourful awesome driver, "Pink", as they navigate through different boxes and hurdles along the way. While the game might start slow as the user gets past "Obstacles" (cubed boxes), the faster the car's speed gets - while on first thought, going fast might seem like a good thing, it brings forth further challenges related to car steering while the frequency of "Obstacles" increases. If speed and frequency weren't the only things you had to worry about, Space Cadet has a strict boundary zone; if the car goes over that boundary, it falls and dies - so tread carefully! Space Cadet has a touchscreen-based navigation system where the user controls which direction their vehicle is steering. The mixture of speed, steering, enemies and boundaries makes Space Cadet an enjoyable experience for anyone playing! It's user-friendly yet challenging; as a definite next step, irregardless of the outcome of this hackathon, we want to take this product forward (there is still a lot of work to do), and we hope to publish this app on Google play store over the next few months!
How we built it
We built this Android application using Unity and C#. The Unity store was used to create some of the surroundings and templates that are seen in the game. This project surprised us because neither of us had any experience with Unity or C#, which meant we had to go back to the drawing board and learn on the fly. We watched countless videos, read a crap ton of documentation and used Google without restraint to discover and improve!
Challenges we ran into
We can probably write a whole essay on this!! To start with, Unity is not an easy software to pick up. There are so many shortcuts and commands; at first glance, a lot is going on, especially since it was our first time playing with Unity. To do a 3D Unity project, one has to consider the background, design, camera structure, camera follow-through, user input validation, text validation, collision validation, scorekeeping, steering of the car and much more. If we are honest with ourselves, we bit off more than we could chew, but at the end of the day, this forced us to learn and get better quickly, and we can no doubt say that we know Unity today much better than we did two days ago! Another challenge we faced was the lack of proper documentation / online resources for Unity. While game design programming is a massive sector, we were amused with the lack of clear-cut documentation or online resources (for example, Stack, youtube); this made it challenging to absorb and learn content. Lastly, our group did not have any experience with C#; while it's very similar to Java (a few syntactical and semantic differences), the fact that we had so much baggage proved to be challenging.
Functionality issues:
One functionality that we couldn't implement is collision detection - we spent countless hours trying to figure out why our collision detection code was not working but not too much luck. This functionality will definitely be amended for our version 2.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have so many accomplishments this weekend that we are incredibly proud of. To start with, the fact that we finished a good prototype for this project in two days is not something to go unnoticed; we worked extremely hard. We had to go through many challenges and difficulties, but we exceeded even our expectations at the end of the day! Another major accomplishment was the fact that we got to experience Unity. Every programmer growing up has that itch to make their own game; we ticketed off that checkmark this weekend and gained a newfound respect for game developers because this is not easy!
What we learned
A significant learning point throughout this development cycle was never to doubt yourself and try biting off more than you can chew - the outcome might even surprise you! Space Cadet is a project that we are incredibly proud of. What we did with this project over the weekend has been remarkable, and we are so glad to have competed in this hackathon this weekend.
What's next for Space Cadet
We will take Space Cadet forward and implement more functionalities (power-ups, different levels, home screen, speed boosters, car object changer and much more). We wanted to thank MLH and hack_cade_2 for this fantastic learning opportunity; this weekend was excellent!
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