Inspiration
Our inspiration came from playing text-based games, a love of magical stories, and spooky suspense. We also took inspiration from the Hogwarts Escape Room online. We wanted to create the feeling of curling up with a good suspenseful book, combined with the fun of a game where you can interact with a system and feeling like you have some control over the direction of the story.
What it does
Our website features a click-through game where the user gets to play a character in spooky story. They can choose from 2 options for each scenario and follow the story outcomes from those choices. In between the decision scenarios are short clips and collages that tell the story points that bridge the user to the next decision.
How we built it
We built the website using a Hugo theme called Timer. With many modifications, we adapted it to include our game. Figma was used to map out all the story points, and we used Photoshop, Canva, and Premiere for editing the game content. You can check out our current story point map here!
Challenges we ran into
Time is always a challenge with hackathons, but I think one of our biggest challenges was also scope and planning according to the time allotted. We were pretty ambitious with the story and interactivity we wanted to have. In the end, we were able to scale things down a bit by creating collages of images and text rather than video clips for many of the story bridges and sticking to basic editing of the photos.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was our first hackathon working together on a project like this, and we were really proud to see it all come together in general. More specifically, we are proud of the creativity we put into the story and the way you can play the game. We are also proud of the way we worked as a team and played to each of our strengths throughout this process.
What we learned
We learned that we should adjust our scale at the start of the project for the team members and time we have available. It would also help to think about the ways we could simplify some things from the start as well. Finding more team members is always a bonus for future projects as well.
What's next for Hack-O-Lantern Game
We are excited to go back and edit the photos further and create video clips with enhanced editing to replace the collages. We look forward to adding a credits page with links to all of our team members' info, all sources that we pulled inspiration from, and the wonderful free resources we were able to use for images and sounds.
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