Profession Pursuit

Inspiration

I wanted my project to focus on women working in fields that are male dominated as I notice many girls are discouraged from joining different industries for that reason. I feel that people should do what they like and having others deny them of their passions could be isolating, which is what I wanted to visualize with the door trapping the sprites. For the objective of the game, I was inspired by a game titled Helltaker, where you need to find a key before reaching and interacting with a pixel sprite of a character. The game also had the option to collect ancient inscriptions and that led to my decision to add more items for the user to collect in the mazes.

What it does

The game I made gives the user the option between two girls' routes. One where you help a girl named Lauren collect sports related items to support her dream job of being an athlete. And another maze where you help a girl named Noella collect items she needs for her studies as she dreams of being an engineer. After collecting all items, the door blocking either Lauren or Noella is removed and the user is to go up to the character and that maze ends.

How I built it

I worked in Unity and implemented C# scripts when it came to keeping track of the items and also functioning the buttons on screen. I also made each line of the maze with the GameObject tool in Unity, as well as making the three sprites on a site called Piskel. I uploaded the game to itch.io, as someone in my Game Development club had recommended, though it altered my layout a lot. Then I registered my Domain name and had a URL direct link to my itch.io game.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge was using sites I'm not familiar with as it took me a while to learn them. Members of my SheCodes club warned me about Unity's layout and I'll admit it was a bit confusing and I had to redo every line of the mazes multiple times. I've also never used C# before so I had to learn as I went along. The most frustrating issue was registering my domain name as the site said there was an error with the MLH code to which I contacted the site's customer support. The person helping me was really nice, she made my account, and registered the domain for me but I experienced an issue where the site said it wasn't registered under domain.com. Thankfully, a mentor was able to help me a few hours before the time this is due.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that I was able to produce a decent mini game in a day without knowing much of the resources I used. I feel that the adrenaline rush of the hackathon pushed me to put in more effort towards learning. I don't have much coding experience so I'm proud that I was able to do a project on my own.

What I learned

This project helped me learn a bit about C# and Unity. I also learned a few ways to deploy projects to the public.

What's next for Profession Pursuit

Profession Pursuit is a mini game, but I can see it expanding to have more mazes and different puzzles, as well as having longer stories that people may relate to.