Turn 'Em Off

Ending
Gameplay
Main Menu

Inspiration

It's summer and we've been thinking about how we all will use up a lot of electricity turning on our air-conditioners. So we decided to make a game based on decreasing electricity use with a plot twist of an ending.

What it does

In this game, the player turns off switches that randomly spawn at an increasing rate. The number of concurrent switches also increases over time. There are also 3 powerups that charge over time: a stopwatch that momentarily stops new switches from spawning, an ice cube that slows down the switch spawning rate, and glasses that highlight turned-on switches for a second.

How we built it

We tried using the pygame library. It felt a little counter-intuitive at first, but by the time we finished writing the code we found out that it's quite beginner-friendly. Definitely would recommend.

Challenges we ran into

Really learning about the pygame library and how it works took a bit of effort. This was also the first time trying to collaborate with each other on code. We even resorted to using google docs to quickly share code. One of our teammates wasn't able to join the hackathon. A lot of the workshops hosted were all after 1 am in our timezone, so it was a bit disappointing that we couldn't attend most of them live.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of how we were able to accomplish our first collaboration project because we've been talking about doing one all year but never got the chance until this hackathon. We're also proud of using what we learned in python class this year to make something of our own instead of just finishing homework tasks that the teacher gave us.

What we learned

We learned about how online communication was harder than we thought it would be. This was our first hackathon, and we discovered that hackathons are pretty fun!

What's next for Turn 'Em Off

We want to make a version of the game that is available online as an HTML5 game. Also, maybe even work on the project ideas we came up with during brainstorming that we ended up not doing.