The Great Canadian Masterpiece

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  The Great Canadian Masterpiece

Inspiration

We all play video games, and one of our group members is an artist who happens to be a fan of the Group of Seven. We've also visited Banf in the past, and we thought the landscape was breathtakingly beautiful, so it was natural that we incorporate such a beautiful scene in our very own game.

What it does

This pixel 2D text-adventure game shows the player different pixelated landmarks of Canada and conveys the beauty of our country to the playerbase. We also want to teach players that survival is difficult in the wilderness, especially if you go unprepared.

How we built it

We used Python and a game engine called Pyxel. We pixelated the artworks used in the game using Pixel It and used Photoshop and Paint for touch-ups. The complete project can be found under pyxel-master/pyxel/mainApp.py.

We used GitHub for collaboration and version control.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time using the Pyxel engine, so it took a few hours to learn how to use it. We also experienced difficulties creating audio tracks, as the PyxelEditor was unintuitive to use to create music. Other challenges included popping and storing some variables because the code was looped infinitely, so it was hard to work with non-blocking statements.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We always knew that game development was difficult, but we pulled it off in less than 24 hours despite having no prior experience in Pyxel. We also believe the story we wrote is interesting, and later we can include many more interesting and thrilling scenarios.

We also took pride in the images we used. We believe the game is very aesthetically pleasing with complementing colours. In addition, we also take pride in how we were able to implement sound effects. We even composed these sound effects and background music ourselves!

What we learned

• Python object class
• Non-blocking coding style
• Pyxel

What's next for The Great Canadian Masterpiece

This project is just the prototype. There are 4 chapters in total, and we've only displayed Chapter 1: Forest. We can add and randomize many more scenarios to the Forest chapter. To make the game more complex and tense, we will add more survival elements (such as health, stamina, exhaustion) to make consequences more important when making choices.

We also want to include better sound effects and animate some of the scenes. For instance, the campfire can have roaring flames and a calming background music with crickets as the ambience. Overall, we want this to be a difficult, but atmospheric and scenic game.

Built With

• python
• pyxel