The Treasure: A Story on Gain and Loss

The starting point of the game
A sneak peak at the character's relationships

Inspiration

We have a friend who's wildly addicted to a "gacha game", or a game that basically includes gambling. It started off as joke that we should make a game about the dangers of gambling, but eventually we got invested in the storyline and the premise.

What it does

Its a game. The setup and player interface consists of 5 tabs that the player can shuffle through, going through the motions of their character's life and talking to their character's friends and family. And, of course, gambling; the primary mechanism of the game is a mini-game in which the player gambles their money in hopes of multiplying it.

How we built it

We built it through Replit, a decision we'd come to regret. Initially we created 5 different HTML files, but halfway through, we realized that didn't fit our purposes. Then came a hectic rush, in which we pieced together a single HTML file and parsed through all the errors that resulted.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was most definitely presentation. In our initial draft of the project, we had created a lovely, clean-looking website. Once we merged it all together, however, we quickly realized that after we'd finished debugging, we'd have a clunkier, rougher version of our old website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, we're proud that we have something tangible to submit. Given that it was our first hackathon, our expectations were blurry, but despite our inexperience, we were still able to work together to create something that we all had a part in.

What we learned

Planning is always more important than you think it'll be . Because we didn't understand where to start (and where we were going, truthfully), we skipped a lot of planning and went with the "we'll deal with it when we get there" approach. This failed pretty miserably; Sunday afternoon found us staring at an empty file, ready to restart.

What's next for The Treasure: A Story on Gain and Loss

We hope that in the future, we can create a better user interface with more capabilities, as well as a longer and more complex storyline. We also hope that as our understanding of code improves, we'll be able to utilize new techniques to tell the story we truly want to tell.