Inspiration
The two of us were inspired by the mobile game, Tsuki's Adventures, in which the player logs in periodically to see what the rabbit Tsuki is doing. We realized that the game had a hidden allure - the game play is very simple, barely any, but it worked its way to become one of our favourites of all time. Upon reflection we realized that we loved it because the game maintained Tsuki's independence, that it is not a pet but an independent individual capable of many surprises.
Our original idea was to create an app for busy families with a child living away for school. The child would update a virtual character -- like Tsuki -- to reflect their own happenings in life, and their parents would be able to peek in whenever they are free. This would be useful for busy families who would otherwise not have the time to update each other on each of their lives.
In the end, however, we chose to do a different but related project that aims to connect peers. The activities people share need to be less sensitive, hence we narrowed it down to a few categories including studying, gaming, sleeping, out of the house, and secret mode. The significance of this project is that it allows people to join a community of friends, to feel that they are not alone, even while they choose to stay home. Many of our peers tend to stay home for long periods of time, and we have felt for ourselves the sense of isolation that it can bring. Additional benefits of this project include that it allows people to form instant study groups and gaming teams, helping them further their own ventures.
We chose the name Condo22 to illustrate the paradoxical reality faced by people who turn to technology for a sense of camaraderie.
What it does
We were not able to finish implementing a functional prototype. Our plan was for the app to show a user what their friends are doing at any time during the day, as long as their friends give them permission to see. We designed the UI to be centered around the Condo, in which each of a user's friends take up one floor. Each friend is represented by a doodle character, and the floors are animated to show what they are currently doing. There are settings that allow each user to customize separately what every one of their friends is allowed to see from them. One other major landmark we hoped to implement was the School, where people can be seen taking classes and exams. Our university provided us with an iCalendar export containing our timetables at the beginning of the year, and we wanted to integrate that to allow for some automatic activity updates.
How we built it
We set up a MongoDB cluster to hold mock data, and fired queries from NodeJS. We built the front end with HTML and CSS, with Bootstrap 4 and javascript animation.
Challenges we ran into
This is the first time that either of us have touched MongoDB. Surprisingly, we were able to work with it without too much difficulty. However, we had much more trouble with NodeJS because we are not used to its asynchronous structure. We were really at our wits' end when it refused to obey a simple if statement.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Annie is proud that she managed to insert a variable-valued boolean-containing object field of an object field into a MongoDB document using NodeJS, and Harris is proud of the gradients he created in CSS, which are a lot more work than one might imagine. We are both very proud of the doodles we created for the project graphics.
What we learned
We learned that sometimes, we will be pleasantly surprised. It was a pleasant surprise that setting up a server is not difficult at all, and a comparable surprise that MongoDB was generally quite reasonable. We were expecting everything to turn out like NodeJS.
What's next for Condo22
We wish to continue working on it after the hackathon is over. We have a lot of ideas for this project, and we believe they are feasible if we put in the time.
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