Cosmic Combat

Inspiration

The inspiration for our project came heavily from the Hackathon's theme, Star Wars. When we found out what the prompt was, the first thing that came to mind were the epic battles in space that Star Wars did so well.

What it does

Our project is an open-world experience where you pilot a fighter ship in the vastness of space. There you will find it just as fun to fly around shooting your twin cannons at relativistic speeds as it is to simply enjoy the views. Our project includes a solar system will multiple planets, asteroids, and a high-res nebulae backdrop.

How we built it

The project was built entirely using the Unity game engine, with completely free assets. Some tutorials were watched along the way, and there may have been some involvement of a certain Chatbot, but the vast majority of the level design, features, and code itself came from us.

Challenges we ran into

It's hard to point out any specific challenges we ran into since the whole ordeal was a challenge for all of us. As freshmen who have never competed in a Hackathon or anything similar to it, we struggled all 24 hours, and yes, we did work for 24 hours straight to pack as much content into the project as possible. Funnily enough, the biggest challenge we faced had nothing to do with making the project itself, it was organization. Splitting up the workload between four people led to rapid development, but bringing all of those pieces together took hours of careful merging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The thing we're proudest about is setting a high goal for ourselves, and pulling through. None of us had ever made a game before, or done any coding outside of basic java. The fact that we were able to have something to show at all was a surprise, and we really couldn't be happier with the result.

What we learned

Most literally, we learned a lot about game design and the struggles that come along with it, as well as getting plenty of experience with C#. Aside from that, we learned that we are capable of much more than we thought.

What's next for Cosmic Combat

It's hard to say what the future holds for this project. As much as it was a joy to work on, we're writing this piece after working on it for 24 hours straight without sleep. This experience definitely generated a greater interest in game design than we had before, and only time will tell what that will lead to.