Inspiration
Our inspiration for this game came from our childhoods, as the media we consumed lacked diversity and inclusion. As minorities, the characters we grew up with did not look like us. By creating this diverse kid-friendly game, we hoped to spark joy in the next generation of children as they interact with a diverse cast of characters that they (hopefully) are able to relate to.
What it does
Our project showcases a friendly group of cat villagers who welcome our main character, a traveling cat scholar. As we explore the village and speak to the different cats, we learn about their characteristics and the various things that make them unique--whether they be physical or invisible. Upon prompting dialogue from these characters, we are met with different logic-based questions that kids are able to answer and learn from. Our main character learns to treats these cats the same regardless of their background. We hope that the kids that play this game learn both coding and kindness, and apply this to the real-life people they interact with.
How we built it
We used Unity as our game engine and coded the scripts in C#. For assets, we used a combination of free assets from itch.io combined with assets that we drew ourselves using Piskel and Procreate. For version control, we used Plastic SCM.
Challenges we ran into
While using Plastic SCM for version control, we struggled to properly push and pull our progress. Merging our work together would often cause merge conflicts that caused us to lose significant progress. We found ourselves redoing our work often and were less efficient than we could have been.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of setting up the Unity environment with Plastic SCM and completing a functioning vertical slice of our game in less than 24 hours. We're also very satisfied with our game concept and believe the Coding Cat Tales has huge potential to continue development into a full-fledged game.
What we learned
Although most of us had never used Unity, Plastic SCM, or C# before, we were able to gain much more understanding of these tools. As hackathons are a new experience for most of us, we gained experience in how to design, implement, and present a project in 24 hours.
What's next for Coding Cat Tales
We hope to fully flesh out the features we've proposed today, including more quests that teach both coding and kindness, a more cohesive plot, and more minigames to make it more interactive for children of all ages. There are also many quality-of-life changes that could be implemented, such as a save feature, a settings menu, and an adventure log to keep track of progress.
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