Retris

Inspiration Tetris

We originally thought that this hackathon had a retro theme, so we were keen on working on a game design project. After many different ideas and tests, we finally saw an idea that we loved which could also incorporate the idea of sustainability in a way that nobody thought of doing.

What it does

This project is a two player Tetris style game, where one controls the Tetris blocks and the other controls Earth. These players are going against each other and have different objectives; the player controlling the Tetris blocks tries to drop garbage blocks to destroy the Earth, while the player controlling the Earth tries to avoid the blocks and wins when the Tetris blocks stack up to the top. At the end of the game, when the Tetris blocks win, a message pops up saying that although they won, the Earth still died and it is important to preserve and renew our resources in order to provide an environment that future generations can enjoy and live peacefully. While this is a friendly looking game, it metaphorically explains the environmental crisis and displays the value that we must place on the planet that we inhabit.

How we built it

As a group of three, we worked cooperatively on visual studio and used pygame to create our project.

Challenges we ran into

As a team, we have coding background within Java, HTML, and Python. However, we have barely touched Pygame, and thus have a very limited skillset in this library. Throughout this hackathon journey, we had several roadblocks that made us have to research and ask mentors for help, since we were learning to program with this library as we were making this project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Considering we came into this event having very little to no experience with Pygame, we are mostly very happy to have a functioning game. We were able to solve the biggest problem of figuring out how to code the in-game collisions, so we were also very proud to have overcome that issue. Also, we are proud of having come up with a very unique idea, as nobody would typically think of a multiplayer Tetris game, and we also were able to include ideas of sustainability into it.

What we learned

We learned to persevere through challenges because there were many times that the code was not working and we were getting frustrated and almost gave up. However, we brought each other up and used all the resources that we had to push through our problems.

What's next for Retris

Because of time limitations, there were several ideas that we had to leave out but would still love to add to Retris in the future. The first is a main screen with a difficulty setting and tutorials. The difficulty setting would change the speeds that the blocks fall down and help balance out the playing field between the two players. Also, we would love to include AI in our code in order for players to be able to play the game individually without the need for another player. The player would have the option to either play the trash blocks and strategize to trap and kill the Earth or play as the Earth to try and avoid the trash blocks.