The Buddy System

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Inspiration

The original goal of this project was to make a pygame-based platform game, as the group has a shared interest in gaming. Being able to educate in the form of a video game allows for an interactive and fun learning environment, while also being able to relay important information on our topic, Mental Health.

What it does

The Buddy system uses platform game gameplay to convey how mental health issues affect the people around you. The main character meets friends along the way, each of them conveying signs of different mental health struggles. Little Red, your playable character, has to help her friends accept and overcome their mental health struggles, by understanding their position and defeating a final boss associated with their mental struggle. This game provides an easy-to-use, user friendly, and fun and interactive game that educates the player on mental illness, and displays a theme of friendship and how that can help the people around you.

How we built it

This game was built in Visual Studios Code by importing Pygame libraries into the interface, and of which the libraries need to be used in the Python language.

Challenges we ran into

Time was the biggest issue when creating this project. The final product of the game was not yet accomplished, as a prototype of the game mechanics and main storyline was created. We have to simplify our goal in order to finish on time. To resolve this issue, we focused on making the first level as playable as possible, which has all the core mechanics of the game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this is most our groups second hackathon, and one members first hackathon, we are extremely proud of the game we have created. This is our groups second time making a game using the pygame libraries, and the prototype product was more than we expected it to be. After many hours coding over the duration of hackathon, seeing the application of our hard work come to fruition and implementation was thrilling.

What we learned

This has been a completely new experience to us as we have little experience with pygame. Through this project, we have learned to create complex character classes, some including AI in order to function as non-playable characters. Furthermore, we've learned some of the inner workings of game design, including map creation which used csv file reading within the code.

What's next for The Buddy System

We hope to implement online multiplayer mode for players to meet new people. We'd also like to implement a phone compatible version which links to the game and encourages the player to exercise and step away from their computer by requiring certain step counts to unlock new levels or to calm some "friend" characters