WingCity | Devpost

Inspiration

While attending WingHacks, our team was able to experience a nurturing community where women, non-binary, and gender minority students were encouraged to become important pillars in the digital world. Wanting to help others have access to the resources and community we found this weekend, we wanted to create an innovative game that focused on the issues these communities face. We were particularly inspired by the relaxing games that defined our childhoods, such as Animal Crossing and Club Penguin.

What it does

The user is placed in a plaza where they encounter five different environments; within these five different environments are five unique mentors with tailored personalities and knowledge. Female, non-binary and gender minority students can ask these five mentors academic, career, social and cultural questions. In addition to gaining knowledge, users are rewarded with special gems after asking a mentor 3 questions. To add an exciting surprise, if the user collects all the gems from the mentors, they will have access to an exclusive mini-game embedded within WingCity.

How we built it

To create WingCity, our team used Unity (C#) as our game engine and Pixel Studio to design our mentor and building sprites. Our team divided the design of WingCity into six stages: start game, game information, plaza setting, five mentor environments, gem archive, and mini-game. First, our team wanted to tackle the challenge of getting answers from the OpenAI API, which was essential to creating the mentoring aspect of our game. After that, we focused on curating backstories for each mentor, such as setting, music, and personality. Once the backstories were created, we designed custom sprites and added them to our 2.5D game world. Once our mentor screens were developed, we worked on adding a satisfying element to WingCity, which led us to develop an achievement system with gems that could be used to unlock a mini-game.

Challenges we ran into

With Unity and OpenAI, we had a lot of challenges. For all of us, we had never worked this deeply on a Unity or OpenAI based project, which taught us a lot as we worked through the challenges. Initially, we struggled with OpenAI and implementing the API in Unity, which has little to no documentation. During this time, we also looked at the Google Gemini API and found that it was much harder to implement because there was no history of using it in Unity. Once we figured out the API, how to call it, and how the tokens worked, we had problems with Unity and finding a way to work synchronously. When we created a Git repository, we ran into problems where Git would detect over a thousand changes when we only added a few game objects. To solve this problem, we discovered Unity's collaborative Unity version control. By implementing Unity version control, we were able to push and pull our changes with ease.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

WingHacks is two of our programmer's first hackathon participation and we are proud of their hunger for knowledge. As a team we desired to search for technical experience while pushing our boundaries and becoming comfortable with the unfamiliar; this drew us to the realm of game development. Venturing into this unknown territory was both thrilling and nerve-wracking. Fortunately, we found invaluable support and mentorship from the WingHacks team and mentors. Our team holds the belief that as engineers, our future products’ success is determined by our ability to address our targeted audience’s needs. While striving to become engineers focused on human-centered design, we prioritize strengthening our understanding of the worries of college women, nonbinary, and gender minority students .

What we learned

As this was our team's first game development project, we learned the importance of prioritizing the user experience. This includes intricacies such as developing story arcs, reward systems, interactive mechanics, appealing visuals, and user interactions. We also had the opportunity to expand our experience with Unity, C#, and UX/UI design needed for game development. In addition to technical skills, we also strengthened our brainstorming and problem-solving skills under time and pressure.

What's next for WingCity

Although this experience was extremely educational and we managed to get a lot done in 36 hours as a team, there were a lot of other mechanics we wish we could've also implemented. First of all, we would've liked to implement a point system for the CapyBird along with an item shop to further improve the user experience through WingCity. We also thought of implementing a database of cultural data in order to modify and tailor the user experience even more when interacting with Jazzy at the Night Market. Furthermore, we would would've liked to include character customization to allow the user to feel a stronger emotional connection to the game and to tie to the item shop as the user would be able to buy items to customize his persona.