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Lycle Main Menu
Inspiration
When brainstorming ideas for this hackathon, we were at a loss for ideas. Neither of us had participated in a Hackathon previously, and wanted to bring our best work. When thinking through the Cycle of Life topic, our cat started screaming at us. Then we wondered what it would be like to follow the life cycle of a cat or other animals, and the educational value that would provide in learning about age differences between different species, genders, etc.
What it does
Lycle (derived from life cycle) is a narrative game that allows you to live through the lives of different animals! Through a choose-your-own adventure style game, Lycle gives users a chance to explore the circle of life and how decisions may impact these animals over the course of their lives. Lycle also offers customization options, allowing the player to change the color of their player character for the game. Further, Lycle allows you to download the app for offline use as a Progressive Web Application, making use of the Create React App framework.
How we built it
Lycle was built using Node.js development in JavaScript using the React.JS UI framework. This allowed us to utilize the state management that React offers to create a game which can keep track of various conditions that the player character is undergoing throughout a life cycle. We then were able to utilize the domain name provided by GoDaddy & MLH to host our game on a custom domain (lycle.co)!
Challenges we ran into
One of the main challenges we ran into was figuring out a platform to develop this tool on. We started out with developing in Unity, then Unreal, but found that our lack of experience with either gave a pretty steep learning curve for creating a decent application in 24 hours. Because of this, we then pivoted to using React.JS, which would allow us to use web technologies - however, this introduced significant complexity in the how we could edit our game without using a game engine.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are really proud of the amount of things that we were able to accomplish within the timeframe given. As a 2 person group, we were able to create so many different custom paths while still managing time to focus on polishing our game and giving it unique features. We were even able to add a custom music track, sound effects, and custom artwork, which we think help make our project special.
What we learned
Over the course of this project, the main things that we learned were the importance of good design and that sometimes a change in plan may be necessary to complete a project as best as possible. There were many good elements of design that stood out to us during development, one of the best being wireframing our designs before implementing them in code. This allowed us to refine our ideas and get a better idea of how the parts would work together in the end. That said, however, we did take away from this that sometimes a pivot can be good, even if it seems time might not be something we can sacrifice.
What's next for Lycle
While we're really proud of what we completed in the past 24 hours with Lycle, there are many parts of our project that we would love to continue working on. For example, we just didn't have a chance to implement some of the educational goals we had for the project in as much detail as originally planned.
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