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Terra : Earth Warrior
Terra is an educational game aimed to empower children by believing they can change the world through recycling.
Project Type: Coding
Time: January 2018
Role: Developer
Skills: Coding, Illustration
Tools: Python, PyGame, Adobe Illustrator
Note: This project was created at SheHacks Boston 2018
Overview
Made at SheHacks 2018, a hackathon for female and non-binary people in computer science. The game is meant to bring environmental awareness to children through a fun interactive platform.

Inspiration
Since our habits are nurtured from when we are young, we wanted to create an educational yet fun and engaging video game that can teach children about the importance of recycling. The main character, Terra, is an earth warrior with superhero powers, who's on a mission to make the world a cleaner and greener place; we hope that this video game can empower children and make them believe that, with the little compassionate actions they adopt towards the environment, they too can change the world into a better place.
We also created an accompanying webpage, with a "Why Recycle?" resources link in hopes that, through Terra, children will be interested in learning about the environment; it will clarify the importance of reducing our ecological footprint, and how this can be done through recycling.
What It Does
"Use Terra’s superpowers to blast the trash away! You can blast by pressing your mouse. Terra will face your cursor wherever it is on the screen, so make sure to turn around!"
There are two items the player is interacting with in the game: a recyclable bottle, and non-recyclable waste. The player must shoot the waste before it reaches the recycling bins, all the while dodging the recyclable bottles so that they can make it into the bin. The player wins if they can maintain Terra's health bar throughout the 2-minute duration of the game, but loses if the health bar drops to 0 before the 2 minutes are over.
The accompanying website provides information on the character Terra, instructions of on how to play the game, as well as information and resources on the importance of recycling, targeted to children.
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How We Built It
We built the game using Pygames, and created the graphics by ourselves. The accompanying website was built with HTML and CSS.
Challenges We Ran Into
Hacking something at all, since we were a group of two with very little experience, in addition to creating a project while simultaneously having to learn a new language at the same time.
Accomplishments We're Proud Of
Participating in our first Hackathon and being able to merge our skills together to create a holistic project, as well as putting in all our effort and knowledge into it given our very limited experience.
What We Learned
To push ourselves towards hacking something despite our limited CS experience, the importance of having fun and enjoying the project you are creating, as well as the power of collaboration and partnership.
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What's Next
Renewing the game's graphics, updating the website's look and contents, and embedding the game on the website.
Built With
CSS3, HTML5, Pygame