Xuklis' Quest | Devpost

Inspiration

When we first set out to create a game, our main focus was figuring out how to make it as beneficial as possible. For us, that meant:

Providing as many hours of fun as possible, allowing for unlimited play sessions
Being educational in a way that feels dynamic and natural

Because of this, creating a single, static escape room wasn’t enough, since it can only be played once. Our goal became designing a simple mechanic that could be built within hackathon time, while still being fun and reproducible. While browsing the Xuklis website, we were inspired by their mascot, which led us to design a cooperative escape room game featuring AI-generated text puzzles. These puzzles are different every time, and the glove on the characters’ heads enables unique interactions that encourage communication and collaboration between players.

What it does

This is a two-player video game with the option for a spectator to join. One player creates a session, shares a unique session code, and chooses whether to play or spectate. Only two players can actively play at the same time.

The core mechanic is inspired by the Xuklis mascot, which has a glove on its head, and by the classic game rock-paper-scissors. Each player’s glove can take one of the three shapes, but only one shape can be active at a time across both players. For example, if one player selects scissors, the other can only choose between rock and paper. Depending on the selected shape, players can perform specific actions, such as cutting a string with scissors or picking up objects with paper.

This design enforces cooperation, as no single player can perform all actions alone. Players must communicate and coordinate their choices to progress through the room.

For the educational aspect, players encounter an enigma that must be used as the password for a computer. Using AI text generation, the game selects a random word from different educational fields such as science, literature, or geography, and generates an enigma based on it. To support players, additional educational texts are scattered around the room, one of which contains information related to the answer.

How we built it

We built a multiplayer game using Unity with a Python FastAPI backend. Game setup is handled through HTTP connections, while player movement, interactions, and environment updates are transmitted via WebSockets. The backend also includes an endpoint that connects to the Hugging Face API to generate the enigmas used in the game. For text generation, we used Llama 3.3.

Challenges we ran into

One of the first challenges was fully understanding the scope and goal of the project. Once that was clear, development went much more smoothly—aside from the usual hackathon struggles, such as multiplayer connection issues, unexpected system crashes, and mysterious network problems that were ultimately solved by switching Wi-Fi networks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of delivering a fully working video game within such a short time frame. We’re especially happy with the core mechanic and overall design, which integrates the Xuklis characters in a meaningful way while remaining fun, collaborative, and engaging.

What we learned

Since only one team member had prior experience with Unity, the project was a big learning opportunity. We gained hands-on experience with Unity’s development environment, real-time WebSocket communication, using transformer models through the Hugging Face API, and creating sprites and animations for a video game, including how to properly structure animation frames and environment assets.

What's next

Next, we’d like to improve some UI elements and expand the game by making it fully procedural. This would involve generating new rooms and puzzles algorithmically, allowing each playthrough to feel unique and appropriately challenging. Due to hackathon time constraints, we were only able to implement the mechanics in a single fixed room, with replayability mainly coming from the AI-generated text puzzles.