kenshiro_kills | Devpost

Start Screen
Data Representation and Abstraction
Stage Design

Inspiration

We've always wanted to try and develop a browser game similar to many of the viral ones that we've seen - websites that are simple but oddly addictive and fun to visit because of their simplicity. In terms of the topic around which the game would revolve we decided to use Kenshiro, an older but none the less important cultural symbol. Known for pioneering action animation for its time, we knew that the fist of the north star would be good pick.

What it does

The game is built in the browser and represents the player as a mouse cursor that is being tracked. The game continually creates "enemies" represented by Kenshiro sprites. These sprites have a variety of movement patterns from something as simple as move horizontally across the screen to more complex behaviors like actively moving towards the current location of the player's cursor. This mix of movement behaviors along with a nostalgic soundtrack is what brings the game together into a great experience.

How we built it

Kenshiro_Kills is built with Javascript, HTML, and CSS. When considering project functionality, it would have been overkill to use a game library and we felt it was in the spirit of the hackathon to build something from scratch.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of fun ideas going into HackMIT but we couldn't settle on one until the day of the hackathon. This left us with less time than we could have had but we managed to pull through. Designing the project was a bit difficult as well, we had to delegate responsibilities but at the same time ensure we all developed with an agreed-upon code format so that our pieces locked together seamlessly. This admittedly did not go as well as expected but we managed to make it happen.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of how this project turned out. We did not even know what we were actually making until we arrived at MIT so being able to come up with such a creative idea and implementing a good minimum viable product this weekend was impressive. We got really into it and had so many good ideas for additional features but time constraints forced us to pick the few that were most important and our decision making skills really pulled us through. We're proud of that.

What we learned

This project taught us a lot about team coordination and web development. In the beginning, we started going off on our own directions but after we rallied and coordinated what to do first, development went much smoother. We each knew what we were responsible for and slotting it all together was much easier at the end. We used parts of Javascript we hadn't used before to create this game and that was a good opportunity.