The Anthill | Devpost

The Anthill
Aldrich Park
Langson Library and Gateway
Multiplayer gameplay
Interactive map
A player wanders around Aldrich Park
Enjoying coffee in Java City

Inspiration

These days, college students are generally very busy, often having their own packed individualized schedules. In such an environment, it can be hard to create a shared sense of community that a college campus should have, where people feel cohesive and bonded. We took heavy inspiration from concepts such as the Metaverse and Club Penguin to create The Anthill with the goal of providing an easy platform for students to connect with their fellow Anteaters and feel involved in the UCI community no matter where they were. Through The Anthill, users can easily find friends to hangout with, fellow classmates to study alongside, and feel comfortable meeting others in a safe environment.

What it does

The Anthill serves as a virtual community for UCI students to join and interact with their fellow Anteaters. Using servers with lobby codes serving as IDs, users can create and join lobbies to meet with others. The game also provides in-game text and voice chat, the ability to virtually tour campus by moving your avatar, and interact with other buildings/players. Through its various features, The Anthill eliminates the time/energy costs associated with in-person meetings, encourages users to be more willing to step out of their comfort zone and meet new people, and create an inclusive environment where everyone can easily get involved regardless of location or physical ability. However, The Anthill is not meant to be a total replacement for in-person meetings. It is simply a fun alternative and an additional option that Anteaters can use to meet new people.

How we built it

We built The Anthill using Unity with C# as our language of choice for implementing our scripts. We also used Figma and some photoshop tools to create our sprites, animations, and other models.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was our lack of prior experience with Unity. One of our goals with this hackathon was to challenge ourselves to work with new technologies that we weren't familiar with. While we did end up learning a lot through our project, we faced many challenges involving setup with Unity, facilitating multiplayer gameplay through Photon, writing scripts to trigger events, and creating our own sprites/animations for the game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of our most proud accomplishments was the design of the map, which we created from scratch to mirror the layout of UCI's campus. We are also happy that we were able to overcome our initial hurdle of supporting multiple players in one lobby while ensuring everyone's view of each other remained efficiently updated in real-time.

What we learned

We learned the basics of how networking works in a multiplayer video game through UDP protocols as well as the basics of Unity and how to use it in combination with C# to create dynamic in-game events. We also learned how to design sprites and models using pixel art and practiced the creating basic animations for our game.

What's next for The Anthill

While we were able to implement the key goals that we were trying to accomplish with The Anthill, we have many bonus ideas that we would love to implement in our game. Some of these include adding the ability to get in-game information on visited locations (Notable monuments, classrooms, etc.), the ability to play minigames stationed throughout campus, adding various interactable NPCs that could provide certain services or dialogue, and more customizability for users' characters.