Your First Hackathon

Your First Hackathon

Inspiration

For all of us, this is our first hackathon, so we decided to base our project on this exact experience. We have been a bit nervous heading into this, and our project reflects these exact feelings. Fittingly, the main character of our visual novel is also attending their first hackathon and feels like they don’t quite belong to the group. We wanted to bring awareness to the common feelings of low self confidence and imposter syndrome people get when entering Hackathons.

What it does

We designed a full visual novel on a Python-based platform called RenPy. There are three unique and dynamic characters to interact with. Each character has different dialogue possibilities and appropriate facial expressions. It gives the user the experience of entering a hackathon as an inexperienced programmer.

How we built it

The majority of the code was written in RenPy, while standard Python was user for more complex tasks. All images were collected from free collections found online.

Challenges we ran into

We found it difficult to decide on a final idea for the project. Many good ideas were posed and we struggled to identify the best one for the group.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are first proud of the fact that we learned an entirely new coding platform within Python very quickly. Moreover, we used this platform to create a dynamic user experience within the given time frame and with only three members.