Stay Healthy During COVID-19

Inspiration

My Inspiration to make this game was the current situation we are all in. We are fighting a battle against COVID-19, trying to use Soap and Masks to protect ourselves. However, some people have not yet been informed about the virus and ways to protect against it.

What it does

My game simulates a person in a spaceship trying to reach home without getting COVID-19. In the game, Coronaviruses spawn from all four sides to try and infect you. Masks and Soap also spawn from all four sides to heal you or protect you. Masks protect you from COVID-19 for 8 seconds, and Soap heals 1/5 of your health. If you get COVID-19 when you don't have a mask, you will be infected anywhere between 0.5 seconds and 1.5 seconds. During this time, your health will deplete way faster than usual, and you will need to use a lot of Soap and Masks to survive.

How I built it

I built this game using the Pygame software of Python. I used Python classes for the Player, Virus, Mask, and Soap, and I used pygame events, rectangles, and so much more. Most game engines involve very simple coding or even no coding at all. I, however, wanted to have some fun and practice coding. So, I chose Pygame as a challenge instead of Unreal Engine or other cool 3D software.

Challenges I ran into

Some challenges I ran into includes not being able to display Unicode Characters on a Pygame window. I wanted to put emojis at the end of the status messages, but couldn't due to there not being support for Unicode Characters in PyCharm, the editor I used. After researching this for a long time, I finally found this out. I uploaded this code to Repl.it and it worked fine.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am very proud of incorporating the countdown timer for Masks in my game. It took a long time, and changing text in Pygame is not as easy as many other games. I am also very proud of my entire game in general, and how it turned out. I never expected to be able to do such a project for any Hackathon.

What I learned

I learned that sometimes you should not spend too much time on small details. I, for example, spent too much time on editing the spaceship image to have the thrusters change intensity. This took away a lot of time that I could have used for adding new features to the project.

What's next for Stay Healthy During COVID-19

Next for Stay Healthy during COVID-19 is a website version. I am planning on copying this version to JavaScript, using some JavaScript Game Engines like Phaser. I am also thinking about bringing this game into a Flutter app.

Built With

• pygame
• python