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Title screen
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Main map
Inspiration
After seeing the presentation on IFSI this morning, we were especially interested in IFSI's support of immigrant children. It is always difficult to move to a new country, especially with a new language and culture, but even more so for children. As a result, we decided to make a proof of concept for a game that teaches kids American society and customs.
What it does
Our prototype game places children in a small fictional town with three buildings to explore: a school, a town hall, and a restaurant. In the final game made from this idea, there would be a fully explorable town with many different buildings. In each location, children are taught about a different aspect of American society. For example, in the school, they are taught about geography. Our final game would also include minigames at each location pertaining to American culture, like ordering food at a restaurant or placing states on a map. Our game also includes very simple English to accommodate young immigrants with little English knowledge. The art is also colorful and exciting. With our game, children will be excited to learn about their new home. They will be able to relate to the game from experiences in their own lives, deepening their understanding of America.
How we built it
After using Unity briefly, we concluded that we did not have the requisite skills to make our idea using the engine. Therefore, we turned to Clickteam Fusion, an older 2D engine, to create our prototype. The final game could be made with any 2D engine, and would likely be available on mobile and desktop platforms for the best possible accessibility.
Challenges we ran into
Unity was difficult for us, and upon switching to Clickteam Fusion, there were many technical difficulties throughout the building process to overcome as well. Additionally, we wanted to include sound but were unable. In the final project, sound matching each location would be present through music and ambient effects. For a hackathon spanning just eight hours, we may have been too ambitious from the start. We are very happy with our idea as well as our proof of concept's ability to showcase it, but we are still far from the final, distributable product.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud at arriving at a demonstrable prototype of our idea. We are also proud of our ingenuity and ability to overcome the difficulties we faced throughout the day.
What we learned
We learned how to efficiently build a proof of concept of an idea when given limited time. We also learned to use our experiences from this hackathon in the future, tempering our expectations for such a short time period.
What's next for Welcome to Dover!
We will add a fully explorable town with many more buildings, educational points, minigames, scoring, music, and more! Our video details our future ambitions as well.
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