Inspiration
Our team wanted to spread a message about the importance of sustainability to a younger audience, and we saw Power Puff Girls as the perfect opportunity to broadcast to children an important message using their favorite characters. Gameplay is known to be one of the most effective ways to educate young audiences. That's why, we decided to create a catch game to simulate a world of recycling and composting. The game aims to educate the audience about which item should go in the compost bin and which ones should go in the recycling bin — basic knowledge that surprisingly not everyone has!
What it does
The player controls either Blossom, Bubbles, or Buttercup in collecting items that are meant to either be recycled or put in the compost bin, all while avoiding their arch nemesis Mojo Jojo. A variety of items will fall from the sky: banana peel, paper, soda can, etc. and your character must catch it and deposit it into the correct bin to earn points. A simple, yet intuitive and effective game in educating everyone about sustainability in every day life.
Game Features:
- Variety of Characters: Freedom to change to any character (from Blosson, Bubbles or Buttercup) anytime during the game
- Smooth character movement experience: left and right arrows to move side ways and UP or SPACE bar to jump
- Scoreboard: Keep track of your progress, challenge your friends to beat the score and reign as the champion
- Fun soundtrack: Addictive music beats in the background to enhance the gaming experience
How we built it
We used a library called Pygame in order to control the characters on the screen and set up all of the interactive pieces. The entire game was programmed in Python and as a team, we collaborated on GitHub.
On GitHub, we made issues, assigned them accordingly to each of the team members. We were all working in our own branches when dealing with separate issues. We made sure to make pull requests for code reviews before finally merging into the main branch. We were able to split up the work efficiently and work together in certain areas by doing pair programming in order to create the best product possible.
Challenges we ran into
At the start, we were all unfamiliar with Pygame. However, we were able to collaborate and get past the initial learning curve in order to use the library to its fullest potential. Moreover, we decided to work on the PyCharm IDE to be invested in the python environment. Although the user interface felt a bit unfamiliar at first, it was easy to pick up and debug by doing pair programming.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are especially proud of all of the different features we were able to implement. This includes: a character selection option, an increase in difficulty as the score rises, a play again option, and many more that we listed in the Features section. Furthermore, we implement the best programming practices by using Github for version control and pair programming when a team mate gets stuck on a blocker.
What we learned
Throughout this project, we learned the importance of how working together and staying persistent can get us to achieve not only the final product that we envisioned, but something even better. Moreover, pygame was a new tool for most of us so we learned a lot and had a lot of fun coding a game entirely with python. At times, GitHub was also a tool that stumped us while we were using PyCharm but with practice, we all eventually got the hang of it and was able to make effective version control for our project.
What's next for Power Puff Positivity
Next, we plan on continuing to spread this message of sustainability and continue to learn and grow our skills in order to be able to create more works that spread helpful messages. As for the game itself, there is potential to add more levels or even a boss fight stage as the final level. Nevertheless, we are proud of our accomplishments and producing a game that is polished and user friendly.
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