Cyoad is a web based React.JS game engine that let's users create their own Choose Your Own Adventure games online easily!
This project was created in less than 24 hours for the Hack_NCState MLH event that took place on February 3rd to February 4th. NC State students Christopher Fields and Fayaz Shaikh were tasked with coming up with and creating a project that matched one of four tracks, and they chose to follow the Cycle of Life.
Lycle fits the Cycle of Life track more than just by it's name. The sole purpose of the game was to provide an educational and insightful look at different animals that exist in our world and how they live thier lives from birth to death. The game poses a fun choose your own adventure where users are encoruaged to discover all paths to unlock all of the avatars on the home screen.
Okay, time to pull back the curtain. This is Fayaz, it is 3 AM, and I am typing this README after staying up tonight despite getting only an hour or two of sleep last night. While that may sound not so great, development of this game has been an experience of great learning, as this is both Christopher and I's first ever hackathon, despite this being our fourth year studying engineering.
Going into this project, we brainstormed ideas and the idea hit me around 12 PM as my cat screamed at me while I discussed how we could make software about the Cycle of Life. We decided we would make a game in a big engine, and started with Unity. After having issues and realizing we were learning something brand new in a tight time restraint, we switched to Unreal.
The switch to Unreal was less than ideal. Everything we tried ultimatlty lead to naught, and we found ourselves having to restart around 4:30 PM, right as we attended a talk from Google where it was mentioned that many times through the creation process, it is common to have to start over from scratch. After dinner, we began working in React.JS, something Christopher felt more comfortable in but I had no knowledge.
Whilst making all the sprites and envisioning all the screens the user would encounter, Christopher worked on the code to get the HTML side of things running. Once we had a working menu system, we registered our free domain with the name we decided on--Lycle--and did a CNAME to start publicly hosting the game on said domain, lycle.co
And that leads us to here. I have written out paths for the story and we are integrating them while I create this README.
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Update 1:
As the time now reads past 4AM, Christopher has recorded me doing sounds for the animals and playing piano for game background music. We now have all original sounds incorporated into the game as I get ready to write the final story path for now!
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Update 2:
Now around 5:30AM, we have gotten some great functionality. We have game story paths for all three animals, a scrolling background, looping background music, face emotion animation states, and Christopher is currently working on getting the emotion state sounds to play. I feel proud of the progress we've made in such short time.
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Update 3:
Christopher here - we just passed 7 AM and are ready to call this project into a finished state. Sleep time!