Environmental Pixel Art / EvoColor

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  Trees

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  crab boss :3

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  Blandon

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  Paint bucket

Inspiration

We wanted to make a game where players could create their own art, so we decided to make a pixel-art based game. Once we heard about the Environmental Game Track for this hackathon, we decided to make our project based off of the environment. Overtime, there were a few more modifications.

What it does

This game is a puzzle game which was intended to be a lot better. The story is that all the colors of the world are gone and the player has to go on an adventure to restore them. The player has to select the correct paint pellets in order to unlock paint buckets. The paint buckets were then used to restore colors in the world, which would appear as the player progressed. Each color would add a new feature to the game making the game harder and more unique. The player would also learn new facts about the environment, including the history of the environment and the human impact that led to climate change. By the end, the player would also compete in a boss battle for one final challenge. Unfortunately, due to the hard process of bug fixing, this game was only able to experience part of the game which was the movement of the player and the collection of pellets for the first "level" of the game.

How we built it

The art was made in Pixilart and was imported to Scratch. Everything else was made on Scratch. The paint pellets were also made in Scratch, as well as some recoloring of the player and various items.

Challenges we ran into

First, we struggled to come up with an idea on what we were going to make for the Hackathon. We knew we wanted to make a game where players make art early on but we didn't know how to do it. While we were busy coming up with ideas, we attended various workshops, which were fun, but took away from valuable coding time. Additionally, we tried multiple ways to make the game which led to various modifications of the game before we settled on our finally idea for Scratch. While we were coding the game, we ran into many bugs along the way which slowed down the process of the game and ultimately leading to us not meeting our goal of finishing the game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the art style and how it was designed for the game. The sprites work really well with the game even though the game was small and incomplete. We also are proud of the effort in fixing bugs and having something to show for the hackathon, rather than continuing to restart and wasting even more time.

What we learned

While Scratch is good for beginners to learn coding, it becomes hard to code when working on more complex projects such as the one we attempted to make. While code in Scratch may seem correct, it often doesn't work even after multiple attempts at debugging it. Plus, the drag and drop features are slow and difficult to work around.

What's next for Environmental Pixel Art / EvoColor

If we ever come back to the game we will need to first look at the code and make it a little more neater. We might also want to include comments because they are useful in telling people what the code does. Additionally, we might want to break up the code more since a lot of the bugs came from the long lines of code. Basically, if we want to continue this game we will need to look over the code and see how we can improve it, allowing us to make the rest of the game easier.

Links

The first link is the intended boss fight that would have appeared at the end of the game. The second link is the game, which ultimately ends before the second level, due to bugs in the code that were removed. We also tried to make a version which combined what we had in the game and the boss fight, but there was room for too many bugs so that version was scrapped.

Built With

• pixilart
• scratch