The Loss of Opportunity

Screen capture of the beginning transmission incoming animation.
Screen capture of the text-based GUI.

Inspiration

After the official death of the Mars rover Opportunity a few weeks ago, we choose to base our game off of space to remind us that there is more to the universe than us and our choices define our future.

What it does

As you play this game you get text showing what is happening, and then you get to choose between several different choices of what you can do next. As you play through the game, you move down your choices to lead to one of five possible endings.

How we built it

Our game is based on a tree structure storing a series of nodes containing the data for each choice where the parent is what happened before and each child is a choice that could be made. The GUI is based on JavaFX using panes, text boxes, and buttons to organize the GUI.

Challenges we ran into

Being able to find a format where we can upload the data in a manageable way was very difficult. At first our plot had many more nodes and choices than we could possibly code, but after working out how to upload the data to our program using a series of text files and parsing them with key words it became a project that we could make work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The animation at the beginning added a lot of pizzaz to our text game.

What we learned

With this program, we learned how to use a tree data structure and how to implement a GUI in JavaFX.

What's next for The Loss of Opportunity

After this weekend, we've decided to continue to expand this game to include more chapters, more choices and better graphics.

Built With

java

Submitted to

Winter Wonderhack 2019
- Winner Wolfram Alpha Pro and Wolfram one Language access(One Year)

Created by

I wrote the code for reading in the files and organizing the tree data structure to store the choices and data. I also worked on creating the GUI with JavaFX.

Katie Schmidt
Organized format for input text files, the parsing of said files, the structure of the game data, and wrote the basics of the javafx scene.

Laura Albrant
I made the starting animation and created the plot text files. I also helped develop the storyline.

Stephanie BoBo
I mostly delevoped the storyline, in the form of planning the basic plot, a writing rough draft and editing the drafts. I did help with the code, although it was not my main job.

mepothov