Garbage Pirates

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  Main Menu

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  Playing the game

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  Points screen at the end of a level

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  First person view of the boat

Inspiration

Hackathons are all about taking what we already know, and doing cool stuff with it. So, for this hackathon, we decided to take a look at one of our old hackathon projects, and see what we can do to make it even better. Shipworthy was a project that explored how you could create novel game controls with just python script and some accurate computer vision detection. This is a link to that project if you're interested in checking it out.

My inspiration came from a childhood desire to steer a pirate ship like in Pirates of the Caribbean. Our steering controls worked, but the game we made to demo our controls was not the best. So, for this hackathon, we made a game in order to better showcase our past project a finally fulfill my childhood dream of steering a pirate ship.

What it does

Garbage Pirates is a ship game where you progress through three different levels, avoiding buoys that damage your ship. Littered throughout each level is garbage, which you can collect to gain points during the game.

How we built it

We made Garbage Pirates using Unity, one of the many game engines out there. We chose Unity because of its popularity, and large community, meaning tutorial videos are a'plenty, which makes it easy to start using Unity.

Challenges we ran into

While working on the game, we ran into the issue that the ocean we were using was not scalable, and could not be tiled, as the tiles did not line up. We tried to make our own ocean, but overestimated our skills, and ended up using the ocean we had originally made.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This the first real game that we've made, with a start and a finish, so we are very proud that we were able to make one, and that other people can actually play it.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to use Unity, the interface, and also how different objects work. We also learned how to use C#, a language that at first seemed strange and different, but we quickly came to realize was very similar to Java and C++.

Credit

We can't list all of the people, but our game used a lot of free assets from the Unity Asset Store and from online through websites such as cgtrader and turbosquid. Without them, our game would not look nearly half as good as it does. The ocean we use was from a 4 part tutorial that we followed (link), and we highly recommend that you check it out if you ever need an ocean in Unity

What's next for Garbage Pirates

Our next step would be to add more levels to Garbage Pirates, more mechanics, and maybe even different types of pickups to increase speed or health.

This is the link to our itch.io page so you can play the game. It is also linked below! https://bearseascape.itch.io/garbage-pirates

To run the steering wheel detection, you need a steering wheel with green in the middle and the top. Clone the repository and run the command: python3 steering.py You may need to have python3 pip installed.

Built With

• c#
• python
• unity