Patriot Hackers

The main inspiration behind our 'Patriot Hacks' project is the game 'Cookie Clicker' as it's one of today's most famous 8-bit games. Through the project, we had to learn the ins and outs of the Javax Swing and Java awt libraries. The main inspiration behind our 'Patriot Hacks' project is the game 'Cookie Clicker' as it's one of today's most famous 8-bit games. Through the project, we had to learn the ins and outs of the Javax Swing and Java awt libraries. It was quite a challenge to have to learn something entirely new, but we managed to problem-solve and find a way that works for us. We divided up the tasks of our game amongst our three members, having one work on the GUI, another work on the sprites, and another work on the game's main functions.

Our game is themed around Patriot Hacks itself. In Cookie Clicker, there are upgrades the player can buy with "clicks" in order to automate the clicking process. The more of one upgrade they buy, the higher the price is for that specific upgrade. Our "cookie" is the Patriot Hacks logo, and our upgrades are the gold-tier sponsors that spoke at the opening event. We repurposed the Patriot Hacks logo itself from their website, but created unique sprites that encompassed each sponsor by hand using pixilart.com.

Our biggest challenges were related to how it looked. We had problems resizing the images, working out how to make the buttons more aesthetically appealing, making a gallery of images appear based on number of upgrades bought, and other similar issues. We solved these problems by resizing the actual images themselves rather than relying on code (which made the program much slower), making the buttons transparent, and more. We heavily relied on Oracle's documentation for Java, and would not have been able to solve our problems without it. We had many other cosmetic ideas we'd like to implement into our game, but due to knowledge and time limitations, we'll have to revisit it another time.