Inspiration
With the theme being retro this year, making a retro style video game was on the table for our team. The old school racing games were something many of us had enjoyed, so a simple top down racer was our go to choice. Byte Driver strives to be an enjoyable, race against the clock, retro racing game for all ages!
What it does
Byte Driver is a single player, time trial racing game meant for users of all ages! Race around the track attempting to beat your and other's best times!
How we built it
We built Byte Driver on the pygame framework for python. Most game functions were built by us including, collisions, map generation from a csv, menu functions, etc. The website was built using HTML and CSS and was meant to give a retro yet modern feel to introduce our game to users and take them to the GitHub page so they can download and play the game.
Challenges we ran into
Because pygame is a framework we didn't have the luxuries of the prebuilt libraries game engines have. Physics calculations, collision masking, csv track generation, and more was built by hand and often took a few hours of work to get working.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite our difficulties with working with pygame, we are rather proud of the features we got implemented. Collisions were our biggest challenge, taking a grueling 5 hours (from midnight to 5am) to get working properly. Needless to say, the completion of that feature was a sigh of relief.
What we learned
From all of our difficulties with pygame, next time we will simply use a game engine. As much as python is a simple language to code with, the luxury of prebuilt libraries for the engine is something we won't pass up in the future when we have such a short time limit to work with.
What's next for Byte Driver
The next step would be to rework and add onto the "game engine" we have built throughout the weekend. We can encapsulate some functions better and optimize some of the functions and algorithms we already use to make Byte Driver easier to develop with new features.
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