Inspiration
The Trench was inspired by thinking and brainstorming about things that we felt like we learned in our lives recently, based on experiences. We found that being afraid of being either person in the situation - the person needing to be "saved" or the person that "saves" - was strangely common among us. The Trench was born to illustrate that fear in a simple way. We also wanted to create a platformer with Foddian-feeling in a short amount of time, so we decided that we could use the symbolism of descending into a treacherous trench to illustrate our idea.
What it does
The Trench is a platformer/Foddian game with controls that are unique to it. As the main character has made their choice to descend into the trench, they do not have power over how quickly they descend, and can only "updraft" upwards every five seconds. The main controls are characterized by the turtle drifting left or right.
How we built it
We built our game using Unity! Two of us had become familiar with Unity because of recent coursework, and one of them was completely new to the system. However, as we spent more and more time getting used to it, we really enjoyed working with it! We also purchased Procreate, which was a great investment for our project as it was really versatile and useful in giving us the sketched-up feel that we wanted to stick with, both to really focus on colors and fit this year's HackGT theme. We also used SoundTrap to mix our own original music.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest problems that we had trouble with was getting used to learning how to use GitHub with Unity. While all of us had used GitHub before, we had no idea how to do so with Unity, and we found that when we tried to merge whole Unity projects, the file sizes were simply too big. After a lot of troubleshooting and questioning other participants, we were finally able to figure out what we would need to include in a git ignore file that would allow us to commit easily. Because of our slow start, we had trouble gaining motivation, but as we worked throughout the weekend, we became really proud of how much we were creating and how much good work we really did.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
For two of us, it was our first-ever hackathon, and we are incredibly proud of our team for how well we have done! We've constantly been commending each other for our hard work, problem-solving, and quick-thinking when it comes to game design and programming. We were able to piece together solutions to problems on our own from extensive online research which helped us learn a lot more about how to work with Unity and which ways were the best ways to do certain tasks. None of us have ever created a full game like this before, so we were really proud of ourselves to be able to do it in a weekend!
What we learned
For the most part, all of us learned a lot about Unity! While two of us had been using it in recent coursework, we gained a lot more familiarity than we had ever gotten before about how to use it. Unity is incredibly useful for so many things, so we feel that it will always be relevant to anything that we continue to do in our careers! We also learned a lot about what works for us in terms of a development flow, and what things we could tweak or plan ahead for in our next endeavor. Mainly, there were a lot of times where we had wanted to do something in the game that we did not have a chance to do, which lead to us having to let it go. Planning ahead and scheduling, while it might seem like a waste of precious hackathon time, is super important in the long run.
What's next for The Tortols
This was our first time working together as a team, and we absolutely loved it! We are going to look for more opportunities to join hackathons and continue to work together as a team to create more cool and fun things.
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