Lifeopoly

Image of Game Board
Image of login Screen

Inspiration

Lifeopoly began with a group of friends, a group of very indecisive friends. Unable to choose a game for game night, they made a decision that would shape their lives forever. They asked themselves, "what if we could play multiple games at once?" That night, Lifeopoly was created. The ultimate combination of Monopoly and The Game of Life, Lifeopoly was the solution to all their problems and the root of many new ones. It combined the excessive play times, high tension, and complicated strategies of both games to create an entirely new experience. Throughout the coming months, the idea grew and grew. In our KnightHacks Project, we decided to finally bring this idea to life.

What it does

It's a simulation of what the real life Lifeopoly board looks like. It contains character pieces shaped like cars that move around the board, with each space performing a different action, either a detail or rule from The Game of LIFE, Monopoly, or both. We even implemented our own rules to heighten the difficulty of the game. Our project is a virtual version of this for better collaboration and more efficiency.

How we built it

For the development part of the game, we used Unity, along with using C# to hard code other smaller pieces of our board game within the Unity software. Everything was created in a 3 dimensional aspect to give life to the game and create an aesthetically pleasing board. In Unity, we created 3 different scenes: the start screen to introduce the game and offer instructions to first time players, the actual board to play on, and an end message to congratulate the players on finishing the game. Our backend programs gave life to the cars, messages, random number generator for the spinner, and more.

Challenges we ran into

Our many challenges began three weeks before KnightHacks. Three weeks ago, the first of us contracted a cold. By Friday night of the Hackathon every member of the team had come down with a disease. But armed with endless determination, our laptops, and a lot of medication, we persevered. Upon arriving to the event, our biggest challenge became choosing a coding language. No three members of our team knew the same programing language and only one member had a computer science major. When we finally decided on using Unity, a software development application none of us had ever used before, only one of our members had any experience coding in the C# language that Unity used. Yet, we were determined to do our best in our coding crash-course.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Each one of our team members played a significant role in the final product of Lifeopoly. We are all extremely proud of how far we were able to progress into the development while being first time users. One of Phoebe's proudest moments was her creation of the game board and its tiles. Her creation of the board helped the rest of our team to take off in the development of the game. Natalie's commitment to the frontend development of the game helped the board come to life. Kyla and Alysha's backend development helped the pieces move and take in input from the players, amongst other small details like random number generators for the spinner.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the making of Unity projects. This application was new for all of us, so a good amount of our time was lent to better understanding Unity and C# and practicing Unity's mechanics.