That One Guy

Inspiration

Growing up I was exposed to a lot of video games involving meta elements, with elements of the game breaking the fourth wall and directly interacting with the player themselves, along with many indie horror games. As my programming skills were limited, I decided that making a simple chatbot to convey a simple narrative would be a nice, small project for my first hackathon

What it does

Claire is a chatbot, but with a lot more personality than most other chatbots. The program was written mostly with simple narrative storytelling in mind instead of gameplay, however, simple games of rock, paper, scissor and guess the number can be played with Claire.

How we built it

The program itself mainly hinges upon the fake_type function that I wrote in the beginning of the program in order to make it seem as though the chatbot types her messages out instead of simply displaying text on the screen. General story beats had to be drafted on a notebook, and then the program itself was built with many, many if statements, while and for loops, and occasionally a random number generator.

Challenges we ran into

The only real challenge I encountered while programming was figuring out the general story beats that I wanted to include in the chatbot given the very limited amount of time that I had. Overall, I feel somewhat unsatisfied by the finished product due to the lack of polish, but I feel as though Claire is presentable enough for show.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was really proud of successfully figuring out how to use the time module within my program in order to display text in a much more expressive manner. As I've never used the time module or the time.sleep function before, I thought it was really cool to explore it.

What we learned

Technical skill wise, I learned how to use the time.sleep function and the ways I can incorporate it into my program, which I found really enjoyable! Generally, I also learned how fun it could be to code for creative projects, and made me realize that this is something that I want to do more! (This is my first Hackathon)

What's next for That One Guy

That... is a great question. Experimenting with Renpy for the purposes of making a visual novel maybe?

Built With

• python