Mech Mania is a student-run AI hackathon run as a part of Reflections|Projections, UIUC’s annual tech conference. Each year we build a game to be played by scripts written by our contestants. This means we have to create a game engine to interface with those bots, but also a visualizer to allow the contestants to develop the best strategy.
For Mech Mania 27, I was the Visualizer lead. This year, all of our experienced visualizer members had graduated, which left us with a big challenge, but also a great opportunity for change. They had built previous visualizers in the Unity game engine, but we decided to switch to Godot because it better fit our simpler needs.
The Visualizer team wrote the JSON spec for communication between the engine and visualizer, developed a UI for displaying game state information, and created builds for Windows, Mac, and Web.