The Carbon Killer!
Raising awareness for air pollution, by destroying one cloud at a time!
Creators
Audrey Ku
Aadam Alli
Dylan Gold
Andrew Ogundimu
Submitted to:
h2hacks Save the World 2019
Description
What's happening to our environment inspired us to make a difference by spreading awareness. We felt that air pollution was a really big problem that causes lots of issues for humans and the environment. Our game captures people's attention because if you hand a person a pamphlet or a book about air pollution to read, chances are, they'll probably throw it away or leave it on their bookshelf. But videogames are very appealing to the general public. That's why we combined a pressing environmental issue with something that everybody loves! Our videogame, The Carbon Killer, is an easy, pixelated game that is highly addictive. The main character, Recycle Robot, tries to destroy clouds of dangerous carbon dioxide while dodging showers of acid rain! We are using the game to bring awareness to air pollution and acid rain. So we created a website that contains a link to the file for our game, with also more information about the problems we are trying to bring awareness to.
We built our game with pygame, (programmed with python). We used pygame to create different objects for each character, obstacle, and projectile inside of the game. Then we made animations and sprites for every object, and placed our sprites on top of the objects that we had programmed. It was hard to create the hitboxes for the Carbon Killer, which made the characters lose hit points when they were hit by a projectile. But eventually we were able to use pygame.rectclass to create the hitboxes and then we used .collide(rect) to detect any collisions. In the beginning, we wanted to create a machine learning model that would predict the air quality of a certain area. However nearly 3/4 through the project, we realized we did not know how to use SciKit learn to train our machine learning model. We were forced to make the hard decision to fall back on our plan (b) and create a video game with Python instead.
We learned that we should always prepare further when we start a project, so in the future, we can avoid situations such as when we realized we didn't know how to use SciKit learn. We also learned the many details of making a game in pygame and the intricacies of graphic game design. But most importantly, we learned how to work together as a productive team, delegating work and splitting up responsibilities. Even though most of us were first time hackers, we definitely feel like we accomplished a lot and we had fun!
Built with:
bubble
pygame
python
Try it out:
https://air-quality-predictor.bubbleapps.io/version-test
Devpost Link:
https://devpost.com/software/the-carbon-killer