Nightmare University

Inspiration

Our project is inspired by our own struggles as college students with issues that are not often talked about — for example, dehydration, forgetting umbrellas or ID cards, and not having enough food or sleep, leading to consequences ranging from minor inconveniences to disastrous. These day-to-day issues seem small but can often make a huge difference in a student's quality of life, and we believe there is not enough discussion about how these seemingly small problems can drastically affect a student's happiness.

What it does

Nightmare University is a unique, interactive online gaming experience to teach students to be aware of these issues and prepare for them in real life! We combined our passions for programming, digital art, and interactive horror storytelling games in order to build Nightmare University, in which players can roleplay as students at their first day of school in order to prepare for the unique challenges that they will face in the real world. Forgetting to bring an umbrella, a water bottle, or lunch money can lead to fun and horrifying consequences, creating an immersive experience that players will never forget the next time they are really packing up for school in the morning!

How we built it

We built our website using HTML and CSS, styling our pages with immersive graphics and horror-themed fonts. To create animations and fancy shadows, we learned about cool new ways to use CSS. Finally, in order to remember what items the character has in their inventory, we wrote Javascript code to set browser cookies and check them later on, which was very fun and exciting since it was also most of the team's first time using Javascript! We also drew 50+ frames of digital artwork for the interactive game!

In addition, we used GitHub throughout the process in order to work collaboratively, which was also a first for many of our teammates. We launched our website using GitHub Pages so that the game is accessible for all those who want to play. We are excited that we are solving real issues that we have all had to face before in an exciting and fun way that combines our passions for technology and digital art.!

Challenges we ran into

Throughout this whole learning process, we ran into a number of challenges. For example, since it was our first time using GitHub to collaborate, we had to deal with a lot of merge conflicts and errors to learn to resolve together. In addition, we had to do a lot of debugging to make our Javascript cookies function correctly across the different pages. Finally, we had to do a lot of planning to build a cohesive and interactive, engaging storyline that drew on all of our struggles and experiences as college students to truly have a positive and inspirational impact on players!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We drew 50+ unique frames to create an immersive storytelling experience for players, and planned 10+ unique plotlines and endings for players to experience. In addition, we are proud participants of the emerging track, as it is many of our first times competing in a hackathon. It was some of our first times ever using Git and GitHub to collaborate, and also working on such a deep level with HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create unique effects like an immersive background, floating dialogue box, and varying options remembered by the browser. We are very proud of what we were able to learn and build in such a short period of time, and we had a lot of fun working together the whole time to build an engaging, immersive, educational experience by and for college students!

What's next for Nightmare University

We are extremely excited about the project, as it has so many different directions to explore in the future! For one, we would love to make the game even more immersive by adding quantities like HP, Hunger, and Money attached to the player to make it even more intellectually challenging for a player to balance real-life issues. We also seek to add more realistic features such as course selection, professor selection, and clubs and friends for the player to simulate practicing time management for the real-life college experience.

In addition, we want to add UI improvements such as animations, progress bar, map of different endings, and achievements and easter eggs. We would also love to add more scenes and endings to the game to make it the most fleshed-out educational college sim out there!