GeoCarter

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  Opening shot from our game

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  Sunset in our game

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  Mapping in the dark

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  Trees for our game

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  Baja blast keeping us alive

Inspiration

The inspiration for our game came from the game yoshi fruit cart in the game nintendo land. I (Nathan) was and am an avid Wii U user and one of my favourite games was nintendo land. I recalled for this hackathon a similar idea of having to remember certain scenery after being shown it for a time and then having to recall it and the spatial aspect as well. Additionally, I really like building nice looking open world scenes in unity so naturally we wanted to incorporate that aspect as well.

What it does

Our game is broken down into two main parts. First, the player is teleported into a randomly generated environment where the player has 60 seconds to take in their surroundings, memorize important landmarks, and get a feel for the space. Once the 60 seconds are up, the player is teleported to a different scene where there is a 2d surface for them to map the environment they were just in from a bird's eye view using icons of trees, rocks, etc.

How we built it

We built the game entirely using c# on Unity. Some assets were pulled from the unity asset store and some were created using google draw. Mainly, the building of the game consisted of a planning phase where we brainstormed the basic mechanics of the game. From there, we decided on different ways to code the game for it to actually function that way. Finally, there was the research/coding phase where we tackled the problems head on. Given our inexperience with unity, this required lots of research and time spent on forums.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into included how we could map out the 2d map on a 3d unity project, how we could host our game on a website, and how we could randomly generate the locations of the objects. To solve the first problem we simply rotated all 3d assets 90 degrees so that they lay flat and pointed our unity camera directly down. Unfortunately, we were unable to solve the game hosting and the random generation in the time given due in part to us having to miss large portions of the hackathon for school and other prior commitments.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some accomplishments that we're proud of are being able to develop a mostly functional game (the game does not autogenerate a random terrain and is incapable of marking the player's ability to map), and being able to design and create a website on our domain.

What we learned

We learned many things in this hackathon. From the technical side, Nathan learned a lot about Unity and how to use user inputs in it to create the game. Feng and Harry spent a lot of time researching react and how to create a react app to host our game. From a general standpoint, we all learned the importance of choosing a topic early on, getting to work as soon as possible, and using time as efficiently as possible.

What's next for Geocarter

What we hope to do next with GeoCarter is host it from a domain, fix the autogeneration, and

Built With

• c#
• unity
• webgl