Succession

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  Start of the game! There is a popup with info about ecological succession!

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  Mid game 2: Trees have been unlocked! Plants die as you add them, increasing the dirt height throughout the game

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  Mid game: you unlock grass first, then shrubs once the dirt level is high enough

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  End of the game: An entire ecosystem has been created!

Inspiration

We wanted to create an educational game that allows people to see the wonder in Ecological Succession. It 's incredible how plants are able to develop rock into dirt and a full-fledged ecosystem. Through a series of successive steps over many years.

What it does

This project educates people about each step of ecological succession, starting with simple lichen that break down the rock below it, and ending with large trees and all sorts of critters.

How we built it

The project itself was created on IntelliJ in Java. It contains two main classes: World and UI. The World manages all of the plants Each plant has a "lifespan" and when it dies, it adds to the height of the dirt. The UI contains all of the buttons and the informational popups. As the height of the dirt increases, new plants are unlocked!

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to make the project so that it didn't kill off all the plants as soon as the dirt reached its maximum level. We attempted to fix this by having a random chance of a new plant being added, but this quickly caused exponential growth that decreased the frame rate.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first hackathon, and we are excited that we were able to make a complete project in a day! In this project, we're proud of the organization of the project, and creating a project that could be expanded. We're also proud of creating a system that loads up any text file to create a popup with that information. We're proud of our first hack and excited for future hackathons.

What we learned

One of our team members learned Slick during this hackathon, and used it to create this game. We also learned better time management and organization skills. While researching ecological succession, we were surprised to discover that it could take decades for an ecosystem to reach full succession.

What's next for Succession

Expanding on the idea of succession, by adding in animals. As the amount of plants in the ecosystem increases, animal populations also increases. Animals are also crucial to the process of succcession. In the future, we also plan to add limits to the number of plants you can add, so that the user has to wait a bit for plants to grow.

Built With

• intellij-idea
• java
• slick