WPI First-Year Sim

Inspiration

We were inspired by Stardew Valley and thought to ourselves, "what if Stardew Valley....but WPI-themed?"

What it does

Our game is a resource manager where you learn to manage time, keep your grades up, and find a place a place for yourself on campus. This game is a satirical take on the WPI first-year experience, and our hope is that it can be used by future first-years to get a sense of WPI before stepping foot on campus.

How we built it

We initially used javascript, but upon wanting a more abstracted coding environment, we decided to switch to Gamemaker. With Gamemaker, we integrated Gemini AI and ElevenLabs to enhance user experience with NPCs. Gemini was used to create dialogue for each NPC given a personality—this made it so interactions could be both consistent and unique. We then used ElevenLabs to give this dialogue a voice the heighten the realisticness of interactions.

Challenges we ran into

The greatest challenge we ran into was scope creep. We had big plans for this game, but the time we had to learn new software and the short duration of the hackathon made it so we had to decrease the scope of our demo.

Another challenge we ran into was integrating ElevenLabs into our game. Gamemaker uses OGG audio files, while ElevenLabs gives us MP3 files. To resolve this discrepancy, we made a python script that uses FFMpeg to convert the MP3s into OGGs and made this integratable with the rest of our code: a simple call with the text to read returns an audio file in the correct format.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of all the software we learned over the past 2.5 days. As rookies, we weren't really sure what we were going to make or how we were going to make a project going in. Being able to create a game from scratch and integrating AI into it is an accomplishment we are immensely proud of.

Also, the art looks kinda cute!