The House Is You

The main screen
The casino
An npc with dialogue
The game of blackjack

Inspiration We wanted to create a casino game that focuses not only on winning, but also on the reasoning behind each decision. The casino setting gives players familiar games such as poker and blackjack while allowing us to explore probability, risk, confidence, and decision-making. What It Does The House Is You is an interactive casino game where players explore the casino using keyboard controls and interact with different areas, including the bartender, slot machines, poker, and blackjack tables. In the poker experience, players analyze a scenario, choose an action such as folding, calling, betting, or raising, and select how confident they are. The game then evaluates their decision against the model’s preferred choice and tracks their accuracy and confidence. How We Built It We built the game in Python using Pygame. We created the casino environment, player movement, collision systems, NPC interactions, dialogue screens, casino tables, betting interfaces, card displays, confidence controls, and game-state transitions. We also used probability calculations, poker scenarios, action tracking, custom pixel-art assets, and UI panels to make the game feel like a complete casino experience. Challenges We Ran Into One of our biggest challenges was combining many different systems into one game. We had to manage player movement, collisions, interactions, menus, dialogue, table games, betting, and multiple screens. We also spent significant time positioning and scaling visual assets correctly, removing unwanted backgrounds, making the UI fit cleanly, and ensuring that the poker and blackjack interfaces were easy to understand. Accomplishments We Are Proud Of We are proud that we created a fully interactive casino environment instead of only making a standalone card game. Players can explore the room, interact with NPCs, visit different casino areas, and play decision-based poker and blackjack. We are especially proud of the confidence-based evaluation system because it makes the player think not only about whether their decision was correct, but also about how certain they were. What We Learned We learned how to use Pygame’s game loop, surfaces, sprites, keyboard and mouse events, collision detection, fonts, image scaling, transparency, and screen transitions. We also learned how to organize a larger game project, connect different systems together, use probability in gameplay, and improve a project through repeated testing and iteration. What’s Next for The House Is You Future versions could include more casino games such as roulette, craps, and slots with full gameplay. We would also like to add persistent player statistics, more advanced AI opponents, additional poker scenarios, improved sound effects, more dialogue, achievements, and a larger casino environment.