Massive Machine Retro Revelry

Idea

We came up with this idea at the beginning of HackNotts ‘84, a 24hr hackathon at the University of Nottingham. One of the prize categories was for developing something retro themed, so we decided to go all in to win that prize. We initially decided on making a story-based game which itself was made up of several mini games which you could play to advance the overarching story line. In the end, we ended up creating a multitude of different “apps” and made them accessable through a python CLI which was designed to look like an old linux terminal.

Development

Our team of 4 spent time developing the terminal and 4 other apps: a maze game, a battleships game, a file explorer, and an email client. The terminal had commands for running each of these mini apps, and also some secret commands for displaying ascii art of a ghost, a rabbit, and a Blåhaj

Part way through, we had to drop the idea of an overarching storyline because we were running out of time, and developing an app which was in some way locked and required a password was a bit too much for the 24hrs that we had

Everything was written in Python because although not all of us knew python, we decided it was easier for those who didn’t know it to learn enough to get by in 24 hours than it was for those who did know it to learn enough Java to get by in 24 hours

Links

Click here to see the GitHub repository (Backup link)
Click here to see the Devpost submission