Inspiration

We wanted to build a digital board game involving various minigames that occur whenever the user rolls a die. We attempted to modernize the board game format to be more engaging for players by involving more interactive challenges that the user randomly gets. We knew that some of the best games are simple to understand, so we wanted to emphasize ease-of-play.

What it does

The goal of Space Race is to advance through a board game to the finish line. To advance, you roll a die and then play a minigame. All of the minigames are simple, easy, and fun so anyone can play them.

How we built it

Space Race was built in python, using the pygame and gamebox libraries. Our graphics were made with Krita. We both wrote minigames, along with Ben also handling the main board and Oliver creating the graphics.

Challenges we ran into

Of course, a big challenge we ran into was time. Generating ideas, writing code, and creating the graphics was time consuming and we tried to get done as much as possible. More technically, gamebox, the pygame library we used, makes lots of things simple, but some things more complicated. Complex shapes were not particularly easy and handling user events such as mouse clicks was often initially buggy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For our project, we were proud of how we managed to incorporate board game mechanics (like rolling a die and moving a certain number of spaces) effectively in our code. Additionally, the visual assets provide the game with a more consistent design and also more visual appeal. Additionally, we believe that adding minigames to the board game further adds a quality of randomness to the game, which makes it more interesting and interactive.

What we learned

Over the course of the project, we learned a lot about the process of designing and coding a game project, particularly in the context of a team. We used GitHub to share and merge code, which sometimes was a challenge when conflicts in code prevented our work from being combined. However, communicating with our team and manually checking and merging code was helpful in allowing us to advance further in our project. Additionally, adding visual assets to a game was more challenging than expected, as it required knowledge of not only design, but also how to replace and integrate assets in our code.

What's next for Space Race

Currently, Space Race lacks multiplayer but it could be converted into a fun game for friends to play. Minigames can also be added easily to Space Race, expanding its content.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates