Into The Eye

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  Starting Terminal

Inspiration

Hurricanes are the most prevalent natural disaster to the southern and eastern borders of the United States. We wanted to make an impactful change by educating others on the proper procedures and safe practices in a serious hurricane situation through an interactive text-adventure game. We also drew inspiration from the rising popularity of choose-your-own-adventure type games to make it more appealing to pop culture and a greater audience.

What it does

Into The Eye is a text-adventure game that educates the player on the do's and don'ts in a hurricane situation. The user is faced with multiple decisions to make, each of which will have an effect on the ending. As the user progresses through the game, we decided to include a change in the environment of the game as it starts out as sunny and slowly progresses towards the dark and stormy hurricane, shown through colors and animations to help aid in the immersion of the user. The overall goal we had for this game is to promote the learning of proper hurricane preparedness through a fun and simple game. It takes the user through scenarios in which item choices and previous actions have a heavy impact on the possible outcomes to keep the audience captivated and interested in learning about the potential consequences when one is ill-prepared in an emergency situation.

How we built it

To build this game, we used the basic web languages, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The lightning effects are all completely done in CSS using CSS animations. We used Javascript and JQuery to handle the terminal where the story takes place, and all of the game logic. In order to write the story, we first collected data about proper procedure for hurricane survival and followed that with creating an extensive storyboard with all possible choices and outcomes.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult for us to keep track of all of the different paths that the user can take and ensure that the correct outcome is achieved for each response. This required a large amount of play testing to find all of the little bugs associated with typing various commands.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The User Interface is neat and clean and very pleasing to the eye. Personally, we think that the 'terminal' look is aesthetically pleasing and reminiscent of a bash terminal, something that most Computer Science majors are very familiar with. Specifically, we were able to execute simple but effective animations that change as the user makes decisions to progress the story.

What we learned

We learned the basics on how to plan out the story line of a game before we started working on programming it, something we have never done before but were proud to be able to implement in order to create this game. We also learned the importance of repeated trial runs and playtesting in order to refine gameplay.

What's next for Into The Eye

The most pressing improvement needed is security improvements to the website. Adding narration using Google's API is also a future goal of ours. Total rework of the code that makes the terminal function, the way it's currently built isn't very friendly for making these types of games. We could also potentially add other scenarios of natural disasters such as earthquakes or floods.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript