Inspiration
The ocean's most prevalent problem is being buried under trash from human activity- under almost 600 million pounds to be exact. Our team wanted to focus on this problem because littering in the ocean is the easiest and most common crime anyone can commit. We, average civilians, are most likely not dumping gallons of oil into the ocean, not hunting for endangered species, nor are we running the factories that are attributed to warming up the ocean: we are killing our coral reefs and marine life with plastics and apathy. To combat this apathy, we wanted to combine a popular game with a goal to spread awareness about the trash in the ocean. And thus, The Brining of Isaac was born.
What it does
The game follows the simple premise of saving the ocean life by cleaning up the filth left by human activity. Heavily inspired by the game, The Binding of Isaac, the player can use cleaning utensils to help save the marine life in different levels. The further the player delves, the steeper the difficulty and amount of fish needed to save. Players cannot move on to the next stage without saving all of the fish.
How we built it
We first started out by listing out our ideas on a google drive and then partitioned the work based on all our member's strengths and skills. Daniel and Ryan worked on coding the frame and the subclasses while Zoe worked on the sprites and fixing bugs. With the help of the java IDE Eclipse and our previous knowledge with creating games, we got to work.
Challenges we ran into
When we were planning things out, we realized there were too many items and too little time. The boss fight we had originally planned was scrapped because of how poor our time management was. Apart from that, coding the game itself wasn't the most challenging part, but coding support for a WiiU controller. Only Daniel knew how to do it and had to quickly teach the rest of the team on how to do it. The main problem this team mostly faced was time management however.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As Tritonhacks is our first Hackathon, what we're mostly proud of is how we were about to complete a fully functional (and near bug-less) game in less than 20 hours. Usually in class, we're given about a month or two to complete a game. Working on coding for more than 5 hours was strenuous and we weren't sure if we could finish our game because we wanted to code it from scratch. In the end we pulled through and have produced a complete game.
What we learned
We learned that 20 hours was not a long time. During the first 8 hours we thought we could take it slow but our poor time management skills hindered our progress. The main lesson learned is that in the future, we should jump straight into project working and taking less breaks.
What's next for The Brining of Isaac
We did not get to finish the music nor did we have time to implement our final boss. In the near future, we hope to flesh the game out even more and even plan on presenting it to our peers.
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