Tech Tower T Heist

Inspiration

The inspiration of this project was the Georgia Tech tradition of the ultimate challenge of stealing the "T" off of the top of Tech Tower. Combined with the goal of acquainting people with Georgia Tech's campus and other Georgia Tech information, we created this interactive game.

What it does

The Tech Tower T Heist places players in central campus at Tech Green. From there, they are able to navigate to different locations on campus. At each location, they must complete a challenge in order to win an object necessary for the heist. However, failing any challenge makes them lose energy points (if they reach 0, it's game over). Players are able to gain energy points by, at any time, going to one of the dining hall/restaurant options around campus, but they must spend dining dollars in this process (for which they have a limited budget). At any point, the player is able to go to Tech Tower to attempt the heist, but if they fail, they are sent back to continue collecting items. If they succeed, they have won the game!

How we built it

We built the full, backend, text-based version of the game using classes/methods in Python, using the Idle IDE. We implemented the partial frontend Python GUI using Tkinter, also coded in IDLE. The project is fully Python-based.

Challenges we ran into

Exploring the Python GUI was completely new to us, so it was difficult to integrate our backend Python code into it. For this reason and due to time constraints, we developed it separately as a text-based game, but this made it difficult to combine with the frontend after it was fully created. In addition, because we are relatively novice coders, we were limited to Python for the language we could use to implement our game, as we had no prior experience with other languages or frameworks. Finally, it was rather challenging to link together all the locations to form the navigation of the game, which we overcame using a navigation "Map" class.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our ability to implement an interactive game using purely Python, and the new information we learned about Tkinter and Python's GUI (which we discovered is surprisingly powerful). To this end, albeit it's a partial implementation, we are proud of the frontend GUI, as it was built with no prior knowledge of the process. In addition, we are proud of the creativity of our game and its originality, as well as the many different paths/options we allow for the user (the game is flexible and responsive).

What we learned

We learned many new things about Python's GUI. In addition, we learned about how to plan/develop/debug code efficiently in a group setting. We learned the importance of mapping out a project (especially a game) before diving into the code. Finally, we learned how much we could do with just simple Python!

What's next for Tech Tower T Heist

Tech Tower T Heist is now looking to become fully implemented in the frontend using Python's GUI. In addition, it can be made even more powerful by incorporating more information about Georgia Tech and even more locations, as it can be used potentially as an interactive game to acquaint new/prospective students to GT's campus, traditions, and general information.

Built With

• python
• tkinter