Safer At Home

Menu
top down in-game mini map

Inspiration

For our first Hackathon, we wanted to create something fun, interactive and meaningful. We decided to make a game and we eventually settled on Unity as a platform for development.

What it does

Safer At Home allows the player to get a different perspective on the virus by either playing as an essential worker, or working from home. The player must refill their health and food stats while staying away from the other human "AIs" in order to not get infected. This is a top down style game set in a low poly city grid.

How we built it

We utilized Unity's Collaborate platform instead of Git into order to share code and track changes. We broke down the project into smaller pieces by assigning game tasks to each team member(map, move mechanics, UI, other humans, etc). We used a shared Google Doc to outline our project.

Challenges we ran into

Having little experience with Unity, all of us were forced to learn something new in a short amount of time. The human pathfinding algorithm, saving game states, class inheritances and object hierarchies, and merging code all gave us trouble at some point.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got a game working! It's not super polished but we have a working map, moveable character, moving "AIs," game menus, a mini-map, scripts and controllers for game stats.

What we learned

How to develop a game from scratch and work in team to create something quickly. We learned how to break down a large task and prioritize the most important features to deploy. All of us definitely bolstered our C# skills.

What's next for Safer At Home

There's a lot of fine tuning that needs to be done. The A* algorithm that controls the NPC humans could use some work. Editing of the player's health and hunger statistics, logging the npc's stats at the end of the game, tuning movement controls as well as adding the ability to switch between a secondary worker role(essential worker, and remote worker) would make this game more complete.

Built With

Submitted to

HackDSC
- Winner Overall: Second Prize
- Winner Accessibility: Third Prize
- Winner Healthcare: Third Prize

Created by

I worked under the hood developing some of the basic game mechanics. I designed the Player Class and Human Class. I also worked on and designed many of the classes for buildings and collision/trigger detection.

Private user
Focused on game mechanics, designed and and built the map, collaborated on npc algorithms and pathfinding A* Algorithm.

Ezra Moussa
Developed Title Screen, Options pop-up, Credits Screen, and Pause Screen.

Collaborated on game design.

Octavio. Anino.
I focused on setting up the NPCs, their behaviors and their pathfinding. It was a challenge getting the A* algorithm to work given the game environment we were working on, but I'm satisfied with what I've done. It's still a work in progress though as there are many things I could improve on it.

Enrique Davalos