SpaceChick

Start screen
End game screen
Chicken in a spaceship
Fox with one egg (target)
Fox with three eggs (target)
King fox with golden egg (target)
Planet 2 (Obstacle)
Planet 1 (Obstacle)
Astroid (Obstacle)
Planet 3 (Obstacle)
Background star 2
Background star 4
Background star 5
Background star 1
Background star 3

Inspiration

We knew we wanted to create a 2D Android game that involved some sort of tilting feature. Our starting design was a space galaxy adventure kind of game. However, when our graphic designer was drawing the spaceship, she recalled it was the year of the rooster according to the Chinese Lunar calendar so she casually drew a chicken inside the spaceship. The chicken was insanely inspiring and all of a sudden, we found ourselves spewing out facts about chickens laying eggs and foxes eating chickens and thus, our game idea just evolved from there

What it does

The objective of the game is to navigate your spaceship (you are the chicken) through incoming obstacles (astroids and planets) while shooting out eggs to accumulate the most points by hitting the foxes that run across the top of the screen. You tilt the phone left and right to navigate the ship and then tap the screen to shoot out eggs. There are foxes carrying one egg, three eggs, and a golden egg (king fox). The score tracker is in the upper lefthand corner and updates +1 when you hit a fox with one egg, +3 when you a hit a fox with 3 eggs, and +10 when you hit the fox with golden egg. When you hit the king fox though, you also gain an extra life. You can have at most five lives total but you begin with only 3 and when you lose all of your lives, the game is over. The lives are tracked with baby chicks representing current lives left and chicken nuggets representing lives lost/capacity of lives to be gained. The end screen displays the game score, high score ever attained, and the replay button.

How we built it

We began by creating the game view where all the action happens in the main activity. We then implemented our own native Android components that specific objects and actions, each with different scheduled tasks for concurrency. Each object of the game is an individual class and they all implement some of the same features of the class GameObject, such as their x and y position on the screen and the speed at which they are moving.

Challenges we ran into

Definitely for us the biggest challenge was figuring game-design - what the objective of the game would be, how difficult should we make the obstacles, how many eggs are allowed to be shot at one time, how should the foxes appear on the screen, etc.. Besides game design, we also struggled with how to implement some of our ideas, in particularly the hit box around our colliding objects that would sense if the two objects have collided and return true. We ended up settling on testing all four corners of the two objects and seeing if they overlap within each other's image area.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Apart from just thinking up of the cute and clever idea in general of chickens vs foxes, we are most proud of the design and multi-functionality of our game. All of our graphics and images are hand drawn, edited on photo-shop, and then scanned. Each image has a specific relation to the theme of the game and look absolutely adorable. Even the stars in the background are constantly sparkling. Moreover, our game incorporates multiple different functions of a typical 2D game, such as tilting to move, tap to shoot, decreasing "health" bar, increasing score counter, etc.

What we learned

Probably our biggest take away was learning the math behind correlating the degree of tilt of the mobile and the acceleration of our ship. We ended up setting the degree of tilt as a range of numbers from -10 to 10 where 0 is no tilt and -10 and 10 are complete 90 degree tilts to the left and right, respectively.

What's next for Space Chick

Throughout the entire hacking process, we were constantly thinking of additional game-play features we could implement in the game in future updates, such as bosses, combo attacks, and providing more counter-play. Moving forward, we would also like to incorporate levels so there is a distinct difference in difficulty as opposed to what we have right now which just the obstacles fall at an increasing speed. We would also like to develop better control for where and when we drop the obstacles to inadvertently dropping several clumped together and making them impossible dodge. Additionally, we would also like to try to recreate it as an ios app for a larger audience base.