Hormone Adventure Game

Inspiration:

All of the members of our team are in BMEN, and most of us are novices at programming. We wanted to make something that would be beneficial to fellow BMEN students, or anyone interesting in studying anatomy/physiology. We were inspired by our physiology class to create a study game that would help students practice and learn the various hormone pathways. We believe that the hormone pathways would be a great subject for a simple adventure game.

What it does:

The code is a text-based fantasy adventure game, that is meant to help students learn the hormone pathways. Our current code focuses on the adrenal pathway, which is important for the production of cortisol (the stress hormone). The code presents various prompts, where the player will traverse the “dungeon” of the endocrine system.

How we built it:

We built the program using Python, by collaborating in Coding Rooms.

Challenges we ran into:

The main challenge of the coding process was creating the GUI. Our group had very limited-to-no experience using GUIs. We had a lot of difficulty coding the buttons. Specifically, we could not get the buttons to change the prompt when they were clicked. However, we did manage to get most of the buttons working in the final version of the code. Additionally, we had difficulty uploading an image to the GUI, but we managed to successfully upload an image to the GUI. Overall, implementing our game into the GUI was the most difficult part of the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We are very proud of the GUI that was produced during the hackathon, even though it is not a complete GUI because it is missing multiple options that we had in the text-based game. Even with this, the game does work entirely as we wanted: we are able to guide the player from start to finish with limited choice options. We are very proud that we managed to get the GUI to this state of completion because a majority of the hackathon was spent on reading about GUIs and how to customize them.

What we learned:

We all learned more about building and using GUIs in Python. A majority of the hackathon was spent trying to get the GUI to work with our game. We learned about how use a variety of functions with GUIs, and how to customize them. We started the hackathon with little-to-no experience with GUIs, and we have learned a lot about how to make, implement, and customize them.

What's next for Hormone Adventure Game:

The next step for our game is to finish the GUI for the adrenal pathway by adding the additional player choices. Once we manage to fully implement our text code into the GUI, we want to add pictures to improve the overall experience by making it more engaging. Finally, we want to expand the game to other hormone systems. This will allow users to practice a large variety of hormone pathways, which can improve the game as a study tool.