Airplane Assembly

Inspiration

Our inspiration was from a game called TankCraft as well as games similar to it. TankCraft is a game where you build a tank and battle your friends. A lot of the features in this game (mainly inventory and test window) was modeled off of the game. The main difference is objective.

What it does

This game allows the user to build a simple plane by assembling the fuselage, wing, and tail (a lot like how it is done in real life). The user is welcomed with a main screen page with the options of Play and Quit. When the user presses play, the game takes them to a design space page with the header "Airplane Assembly" at the top. On both sides of the space, there are parts for the plane. At the top two corners, there is the back button and reset button. At the bottom the screen, there is a green button that tests the plane. The parts are draggable, and they will snap to the invisible grid (either mouse-click or touchscreen). Once the user is satisfied with the design, they will press the green button. The game will provide a result of success or fail. The game will run as long as the window is open. Once the user is done, they will press back to get to main menu. At the main menu, the user presses quit to end the program.

How we built it

All our work was done on one Visual Studio Code Python Workspace. For graphics, those were created using Adobe Illustrator.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the inventory, different windows, and snap to grid to work took us the longest. Additionally, going from shapes to images added a little bit of complexity. Also, we have weekend commitments for class that added to the challenge of completing this on time. There were also very small things, such as filenames and syntax, that made the program not work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that we got the basic functionalities to work is amazing. None of us worked with Pygame and a lot of the python tools, so it was definitely an experience. Considering this is our first hackathon, we felt like did pretty well. We remained persistent and optimistic and that led to great results.

What we learned

We learned a lot more about Python and Pygame. We spent time watching Youtube videos on certain functions to understand how they work. Stack overflow and other forums guided us as well. Beyond coding, we learned how to work efficiently and effectively. We learned to define the mission and set up a task list to tackle tasks in a specific order. We also learned how to make a good team structure so that everyone was able to contribute.

What's next for Airplane Assembly

We want to make a more detailed test window where it shows the plane in a test environment. It will show basic metrics such as altitude, speed, and distance. The result from the test won't be random, but rather based on the design configuration.