Brain Defense

Inspiration

These days, there aren’t many games that are focused specifically on the empowerment of women. Rather, they are often focused on entertainment through accomplishing missions tied to storylines. That’s why we wanted to create something unique for women that not only raises awareness for the gender-specific prejudice and difficulties they face, but also empowers them. We want to encourage strength and tenacity, not letting our minds succumb to negative emotions.

That’s why we created Brain Defense, a simple tower defense game that shows problems women currently face in society and ways women can handle and overcome those problems. More broadly, our game emphasizes the importance of maintaining a strong mental defense for people of all backgrounds.

What it does

In the game Brain Defense, we have positive actions and emotions as our defenders and negative actions and emotions as our enemies. What these symbols represent can be found in our how to play page.

Main objective: Keep up your mental defense and shoot down negativity before negativity gets to your brain and overwhelms you.

Different enemies approach from the right of the screen; their goal is to reach the left side(your mind) and overwhelm you. You must stop them before that happens. For example, if we have 'fear' coming, you can defend it with any defender of your choice. These defenders cost willpower to summon, which you can obtain by waiting for it to spawn naturally or by defeating the enemy icons.

With the amount of willpower you have, you can purchase defenders for your mind that come in the form of an icon representing emotional support and more. As said earlier, enemy icons enter the screen from the right, and you must stop them from reaching the left border of the screen by strategically planting defenders that will shoot down negativity.

As the game progresses, more negative things are spawned such as depression, assault, and societal judgment. They will all be coming at you at varying speeds in different lanes, so you must make sure you are well-protected. Once you surpass a certain score and successfully defeat the remaining negative enemies, you will win the game.

How we built it

We built a game using pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript!

Challenges we ran into

It was daunting being all first-time hackathoners with only one experienced member who recruited team members who were interested in creating the game. The main challenge was that everyone recruited was familiar with C++ — and the game was going to be in JavaScript, and the team has little experience with web development. This was also going to be the first or one of the first games we develop. Coordinating different timezones was also tricky!

While knee-deep into game development, the thought of having a graphic artist on the team crossed our minds. That way, we could've implement our vision in a cohesive way instead of looking for assets (e.g. images) that work well with one another and could represent the ideas we had. One team member also dropped out without letting us know.

Nevertheless, we took up these challenges head on and applied our knowledge of object oriented programming and watched tutorials to help out with game development and coding, and even first-time hackathoners were able develop basically half of the game and put out a basic landing page.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built one of our first games!!! It was an ambitious one at that - tower defense! We took a risk and did it with little knowledge of JavaScript, and we were was able to quickly pick it up with our experience with object oriented programming.

What we learned

We learned a lot about JavaScript, basic HTML and CSS, game development, and creating a minimum viable product. Game development involves a lot of research and design thinking to create a cohesive game, and sometimes the assets we're able to find creates the direction for game theme and mechanics.