Glow

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  The player, along with the beam it possesses

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  The beam revealing a previously hidden firefly

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  The player being attacked by a wisp

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  The player under attack by the void, which appears as a hole in the beam

Inspiration

This game was inspired by the theme of mystery by attempting to make the whole world mysterious to the player. Furthermore, this idea was inspired by the struggle to make it in a world that you aren’t used to that comes with aging and the end of childhood and innocence. Lastly, the void entity in the game which will inevitably consume the player was inspired by the fact that death is inescapable and that no matter how hard you try, you will end the same as everyone else.

What it does

Glow is a mystery-survival based game in which the player is constantly pressured to progress further. You start as a glowing cube with a beam of light that follows your cursor. Far away an entity called the void spawns and constantly travels toward the brightest object in the game. The player has to use its beam to discover the void as it blends in with the dark black background. The player has to find hidden fireflies which blend in with floating sparks and embers. When the player spots a firefly with the beam, they can touch it to consume it. Consuming fireflies increases the size and brightness of the cube and beam allowing the player to discover more of the mysterious dark. The player must be careful however as there are also wisps pretending to be a firefly. When the player gets too close to a wisp it reveals itself by turning red and suddenly tracking toward the player. If a wisp successfully hits the player, the cube and beam get smaller. If the player is not able to use the beam to spot the encroaching void, and the void makes contact with the player, they lose. At the end of the game a score based on your cubes total size is displayed.

How we built it

We built this game in Java, and did it by initially writing a game object class from which every other entity in the game is derived. From this all the other game objects were able to be coded. We also coded a separate animation class, in which everything involved in the game is created and run. For collaboration in this project, a Github repository was used, which is linked below.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge that we ran into in this project was a limitation with Windows itself. Windows automatically sets its app sizes to 125%, which interfered with the rotation calculations in this game, therefore resulting in a major error that took us roughly an hour to fix. Another major challenge we ran into was time management, as it took us a long time to ideate this project, and we were running right to the end of the time period.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our graphics for this game. Graphics in java are not one of our strengths, and the glow effect and particle effects in particular were accomplishments that we are proud of. We are also proud that we were able to finish this project on time, as it took us a while to get up and running, especially considering that multiple of us were volunteering for the hackathon.

What we learned

In this project, we learned a lot about Java graphics, and also learned how to utilize Github. We weren’t previously familiar with the software, and it made collaboration far easier in this hackathon.

What's next for Glow

In the future for Glow, we would like to add a high score system to the game. We attempted to do this in the time period allotted, but it resulted in too many errors and therefore wasn’t able to make it into the final edition of the game. We would also like to add more types of entities into the game, in order to make the game play slightly more appealing to the player over a long period of time.

Built With

• java