The Frontlines of COVID-19

A game based on the fictional story of a frontline worker battling COVID-19

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Inspiration

During the ongoing pandemic, many people are uneducated on the dangers which our frontline workers go through. People don’t realize that the frontline workers are also vulnerable to the virus and risk exposing themselves to their close ones.

What it does

The Frontlines of COVID-19 is a game that is a variant of a text-based game, but we decided to add animations and buttons to make our UI better. The player is put in the point of view of a hypothetical character Nurse Ava. As the storyline continues, the player is prompted with buttons that represent choices Ava can make. There are a variety of different endings that Ava can experience as a result of her choices.

How we built it

We used Unity to create the game itself and the frontend features such as the animations and buttons. We used Visual Studio to create the backend code and connected that to Unity which would allow our buttons to be interactable and animations to be triggered at the right time. For the drawings, we used Asepritre to create the pixel art and uploaded our images to Unity as assets.

Challenges we ran into

As a team, we found the gap in our experience with Unity and Aseprite as a huge challenge in completing our game. Many times, we were tasked with something that was way above our skill level. Fortunately, we saw it as a learning opportunity and we figured out how to solve it using the resources given to us. In addition, we had issues communicating as it was our first hackathon online and we needed a way to effectively communicate with each other. Apart from that, we helped each other out and we all came out of this experience as better programmers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to create a complex storyline, complete with animations and backgrounds which we drew ourselves. Half of us learned Unity and created our very first game, hopefully the first of many. We also managed to include extra features such as text being typed like the original Pokemon games. We are especially proud of the fact that we included a counter which states how many endings of the story the user has discovered so far while playing the game.

What we learned

Half of our team was completely new to Unity and we had to learn how the engine works. We learned a lot about asynchronous programming and the advantages of multiple threads running. Creating this game helped us understand the core principles of object-oriented-programming, especially abstraction and inheritance. We also learned advanced error handling, as there was a very specific way our user had to play our game and we had to prevent any bugs.

What's next for The Frontlines of COVID-19

We can release our game to the public on itch.io and be sure to share the app with our friends and family. We will help make sure that everyone we know follows CDC guidelines in order to help healthcare workers battling the coronavirus.

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