Lakeside Lookout – CSE Senior Design

Team Name

Lakeside Lookout

Timeline

Fall 2023 – Spring 2024

Students

Tim Ryan
Max Wegner
Isaias Roman
Priscilia Eyum
Jacob Ullom

Sponsor

United States Army Corps of Engineers

Abstract

Unfortunately, drowning is a major cause of death and injury on America’s waterways. It affects dozens of people every day and turns a joyous outing on the water into a family’s worst nightmare. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would like to mitigate this issue as much as possible by shining a spotlight on the importance of wearing a life jacket while on the water. To achieve this goal, the Lakeside Lookout game will endeavor to be a fun and interactive way to spread awareness of life jacket safety. Lakeside Lookout is designed to be enjoyable for players of all ages and skill levels. Its developers have strived to use best practices when designing and implementing its many functions. Additionally, they will seek to make the University of Texas at Arlington and the United States Army Corps of Engineers proud of their efforts.

Background

Each year in the United States, there are around four thousand unintentional fatal drownings. Couple that tragic figure with roughly another eight thousand non-fatal drownings, and America averages about thirty-three horrific drownings every day. While, thankfully, most of these occurrences do not result in the immediate loss of life, even the non-fatal incidences can result in lengthy and costly hospital stays and long-term (sometimes lifetime) health issues, including brain damage, loss of mobility, and other serious outcomes. Sadly, many of these tragedies happen to children. While most young drowning victims are a result of unsupervised bathtub and pool use, around forty percent of drownings in the five to fourteen age group happen in natural water like rivers, lakes, and oceans. And that share rises to over fifty percent of fatal and non-fatal drownings for people over the age of fifteen. According to the U.S. Coast Guard, five hundred and thirty-three of the six hundred and fifty-eight boat-related deaths were a result of drowning. Regrettably, eighty-one percent of those drowning victims were not wearing a life jacket. These preventable tragedies are why the Army Corps of Engineers has approached our team to develop an application that can hopefully make a difference in those figures. Because all lives are priceless, and all deaths engender unimaginable costs.

Project Requirements

Touchscreen Support
- The kiosks use touch screens so the program needs to support that input
Difficulty Increments
- As the game progresses, the tempo and difficulty of the game should increase to challenge the user
Online Hosted Version
- In the case, a user wants to play the game outside the visitor center, a version of the game should be hosted online
High Score
- The game should maintain a high score for each session of the game
Forgiving Game Mechanics
- The game will not be harsh on the user, obstacles will only cause a loss of a “heart(s)”, and only after all hearts are lost will the game end. A form of redemption will also exist where the user can gain more hearts
Tutorial
- The game will include a small tutorial which will introduce the user to the basic controls of the game and the game’s main objective

System Overview

Lakeside Lookout was designed and built using Unity, a cross-platform game engine. The scripts which controlled the many aspects of the game, from player movement to switching scenes and handling the score and health logic, were written in C#. The student version of Unity and its accompanying version control system came with many different libraries and bundles, which were utilized extensively during development. The development team also relied upon assets like sprites and animations, which were imported from alternate sources.

The Scoring and Health systems were handled with their respective controllers and displayed with the assistance of Unity’s UI package. The High Score logic was facilitated by playerPrefs, which can be used to store a limited number of values on a local device. Different builds for Windows OS, WebGL, etc. were made as needed.

The overall architecture is divided into three sections: User Interface, Unity
Engine, and the Web Renderer

The user interface handles how what the user will see and how the user will interact with the game, and handles the controls for the different screens of the game. It also handles managing the display of the high score.
The Unity Engine is the main driver of our gameplay loop. It is responsible for managing the user input and sending it to the game state handler. The game state handler sends details to the leaderboard and manages entities in the game with the entity handler.
The web rendering allows our game to be played on multiple different devices. The components allow for touch screen or mouse and keyboard controls. It also can dynamically resize with the dimension parser.

Results

Main Menu

Tutorial

Gameplay

Game over screen

Future Work

The development for Lakeside Lookout has been completed and the final version of the game has been delivered to the US Army Corps of Engineers. There are no plans for further development.