Welcome to Lambda Island, a survival game. You are stranded, and your goal is to survive for 20 days so that you can be rescued.

Here is a video demo of our game:

Since we have written a Makefile, you can build and execute the program with

$ make

The Time System: Each day has 5 time blocks that the player can use to allocate activities. The player will be provided with a range of activities (randomly generated from a wide variety of predefined activities) to choose from. Some activities may have probabilistic outcomes.

The results of the player's choices will affect several criteria, including the health bar, the hunger bar, and the thirst bar. The values of these bars change in accordance to the activities the player select, time elapsed, and the weather. If either the hunger or thirst bar depletes, the player’s health will drop dramatically over time. Once the health value reaches 0, the game ends.

On each game day, a type of weather will be randomly generated. Depending on the weather, the player's health, hunger, and thirst will decrease at different rates.

Sunny day – thirst bar decreases faster

Rainy day – hunger bar decreases faster

Cloudy day – health bar decreases faster

There are various activities for user to choose each day. Different activites consume varying units of time and have different effects on the character's state. Here are some examples:

Gather berries (Reward: +5 to 10 hunger, +5 to 10 thirst, -10 to +10 health)

Fishing (Reward: +8 to 12 hunger, -10 to -5 thirst, +5 to +10 health)

(Some activities may yield variable rewards according to a predetermined probability distribution.)

The UI will display the bars of survival and a brief prompt that leads the player’s choices, 3-4 text based choices or visual choices (eg. coconut, fish, object icons) will be displayed in the center of the interface. We also plan to have some decorative arts to make the interface more realistic and engaging.

Over the past weeks, we completed an initial simplified version of our game and set a good foundation for future updates. We have implemented a simple user interface that displays player status (hunger, thirst, health), weather status, and date in text format. In each in-game day, a series of options (randomly selected from a predefined pool) are displayed to the player, and the player's selection leads to a status update.

We implemented user interfaces for the menu and in-game playtime, presenting information and optional operations. The in-game interface includes details such as weather conditions, date, character status, and descriptions of available activities during the game.

We implemented our main game logic in the Game.hs file that handles generating initial player status, activity options, and player status updates based on player input. We defined the basic characteristics of the activities (e.g. text description, activity effect) in the src/Activity.hs file. It includes a pool of predefined activities that would be randomly selected and displayed to the player.

1. Our very first challenge is coordinating our work as a group. Since we are using different operating systems and have different schedules, we find it difficult at first to handle collaboration as well as version control. Our solution was to plan our meetings ahead and try our best to allocate large chunks of time to work together as a team. To unify our development environment, we choose to work with GitHub Codespace. We also practiced personal branching strategy to maintain version control and merge upon group revision. At the same time, we split our work into two main categories - UI design, user interaction handling and game logic implementation. When both team completes their individual work, we then come together to merge our results.
2. At the current state, we have implemented the UI with basic text-based structures. Our goal, however, includes developing a more advanced and visually pleasing UI. For example, we want to incorporate visual cues for different weather conditions, player status, as well as effects of player actions. The main challenge in this task is correctly representing and displaying the dynamic relationship between our game components. At the same time, the UI should still present choices, whether text-based or graphic-based, with clarity and easy accessibility. To address this challenge, we believe that our current version of the game has laid good foundation in representing the relationships between game components. In the future, we plan on incorporating various ASCII arts into different stages of the game play to improve player experience.

We believe we are at a good place in our development and expect to complete the game by the deadline. However, during our development, we have made some updates to our goals and designs that would benefit the overall outcome and user experience.

1. We have decided to remove the time block feature so the player only performs 1 activity per day. During our development, we realized that adding the time block feature would add too much complexity as well as repetitiveness to this game, and removing this feature would improve clarity and player experience.
2. Since we have implemented the foundational logic of the game, we want to make improvements regarding visual aspects of the game. We plan to add some ASCII arts to our game interface.
3. We also want to integrate the logic of early stopping the game when user triggers some selection, for example calling for help and succeeding or deer hunting and get hurt. This adds to the randomness of our game and makes it more playable.
4. The weather's influence on the survival play status is yet to be implemented. We expect to incorporate the changes in our next developmental stage.
5. We plan to add ASCII art and decorations: integrate ASCII art or other decorative elements to enhance the visual appeal and theme of the game. They possibly include sun, clouds, rain etc.
6. We plan to utilize the library's support for colors to enhance the visual appeal. Assign distinct colors to different elements such as bars, prompts, and choices. For example, you can use green for health, blue for hunger, and yellow for thirst.