Pizzas in Peril

Help deliver these pizzas through the crowded city!

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Inspiration

All of the members of the group were first-time hackathon participants with not a significant amount of programming or project creation skills, so we really had to look for a project that was both challenging and feasible. We thought that submitting in the pizza game category would be best for this because it was most similar to things that we had worked on in class and on our own, but would still be a new challenge for us.

What it does

Our game, titled Pizzas in Peril is a high-paced maze game, where the player must successfully deliver pizzas to homes without running into the sides of the maze. There are five different levels and three different speeds, which control how fast the pizzas go.

How I built it

We used Python and pygame to make the game. Because none of the members of our team had any experience working with user-interfaces, pygame was extremely important in providing such a beginner-friendly way to create a game. With pygame doing most of the heavy lifting, we were able to focus on more creative aspects of the game.

Challenges I ran into

Getting pygame to work on all of our machines was surprisingly hard. We spent a couple of hours on Friday night working it out, and one of our group members was never able to do so. In addition, we ran into a lot of problems because none of us had ever made a game before. There was a lot of learning that had to be done in the process of creating our project, and that definitely slowed us down significantly. Also, none of us had ever worked on a big project in a group before, and delegating work between each other was something new to us that we weren't so great at. A few times, we had two people working on the same thing at the same time without communicating it to one another. A lot of those miscommunications were smoothed out as time went on, though.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are extremely proud that we were able to create a functional game. When we formed our group and realized that we didn't have very much collective experience, we were a little worried that our project wouldn't turn out, but after some hard work, we were able to make ends meet and come out with a game that is pretty fun.

What I learned

I learned a lot about working in a team. I had never done a big project like this in a group before, and my team hadn't ever done one ever. We always hear how important it is to learn how to work as a team, but in school, a significant amount of the work is done individually and we never learn those skills. I feel like this hackathon was really valuable in learning those skills. Also, I learned a lot about game development throughout this project, and reinforced some ideas in python that I hadn't brushed up on in a long time.

What's next for Pizzas in Peril

I would like to revisit this game at some point in the future when I learn more about game development. I think it has a lot of potential and had lots of fun playing it (excuse my lack of enthusiasm in the demo - I am tired). The game is far from perfect but it is easily the best game I've ever made and I'm really proud of it. I think that it would make a really cool mobile app where it is controlled with swipes (kind of like a top-down temple run if you know that game). Anyways, this is definitely not the end of Pizzas in Peril :)

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