Autio

Inspiration:

Our inspiration for this project was our passion for video games and we wanted to dive deeper into this topic and explore the world of game development.

What it does

Our game is called Autio meaning audio and auto for car. We created a 3d endless runner using the Unity Engine to program and model the entire game. There are 5 levels that we developed that are endlessly randomized. For the movement, we decided to go on something different and used audio input from a microphone to make the car either go left or right depending on what the player says into the microphone as well as "Shoot" which shoots a canon on top of the car. There are some objects that are considered "light" that you are able to shoot with the cannon and others you are unable to shoot. Being hit by any of these objects automatically makes you lose the game.

How we built it

We built our game using the Unity Engine and used a built-in plug-in to detect the microphone input whenever a command was given. Found assets from the Unity assets store and imported them to make an array of different roads that could be randomly repeated, which gave us an infinite road. We have some obstacles with a rigid body component which gave them a basic physics model. The obstacles can be hit away using a projectile shot from the car by lowering the mass of the obstacles via the rigid body component. We implemented three commands; Left, Right, and Shoot. This gives the player the ability to move to the left or right lane or shoot a projectile at incoming obstacles through voice commands.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges during the hackathon as no one on our team had any idea how to use Unity or even the programming language that is used to script the game objects. Most of our team members were complete beginners with little to no coding knowledge, but we were ready for the challenge. We struggled with how to move around in a scene in the Unity editor, import free assets, making projectiles shoot. One challenge that took us a long time to figure out was to make the road endless by just manually creating one entire road with obstacles. Another challenge we encountered was the last-minute transition from a system that involved moving the vehicle with a hand motion to voice commands.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Accomplishments that we are proud of are how we were able to create such an interesting game in such a short time using a tool none of the group members had experience with. As mentioned early not many people knew how to use Unity and C#. Thus, we spent hours and hours learning it before we made our game.

What we learned

We learned Unity basics gaining a foundational understanding of Unity's interface, tools, and workflows.
C# programming: Through this experience, you were introduced to the fundamentals of C# programming. Including concepts like variables, functions, loops, conditionals, and more.
We learned game development concepts such as game loops, input handling, collision detection, and basic physics.