MineCart | Devpost

Web App Displaying Challenges
In-Game Challenge Select
Challenge Completion
Challenge In Progress

Inspiration

We realized, often enough, people do not have enough of an incentive to come back and shop at the same shop, especially because they just do not like the entire shopping experience. They just come back for their needs. To transform this shopping experience, we have devised a way to reward and gratify customers for each purchase they make so that they come back more frequently.

What it does

MineCart is a plugin that can be added to any current Minecraft server and allows players to complete in-game challenges in order to earn rewards that can be applied to retail purchases. Players are incentivized both to play Minecraft and to engage with the partnered retailer in order to make use of the rewards they accumulate as they play.

How we built it

We used Spigot as a framework for the Minecraft plugin, which defines the challenges players can complete for rewards and provides in-game progress tracking. The plugin, written in Java, also communicates with our MySQL database, which is hosted on AWS RDS, using it to store player information as they join the server and select and complete challenges. On the web side, we built an application in React.js backed by Node.js that handles communication with the database. The app displays player progress in their selected challenges as well as the rewards they have accumulated. Players are also able to redeem rewards for completed challenges and apply those rewards for discounts on purchases on the app.

Challenges we ran into

Due to the variety of languages and frameworks utilized, we ran into several challenges over the course of developing MineCart. On the plugin side, learning how to establish and manage database connections within Spigot presented a challenge as we began the project. Additionally, juggling the smorgasbord of dependencies in Spigot and especially in React needed to maintain connection between all parts of the project but also just to implement all desired functionality was a continuous source of challenges throughout the course of this project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we generally accomplished what we sent out to accomplish. The various parts of the project were all able to work together in unison, the plugin providing updates as the player made choices and completed challenges, and the back and front ends of the web application were able to access those updates via the database and use them to display information and provide functionality to users.

What we learned

MineCraft plugins were a generally new world to everyone on the team, but, since we have all been fans of the game in some capacity over the course of our lives, we were excited to learn how they are developed and how they might have applications in other spaces like retail. We all also had a chance to brush up on our web development by solving the various puzzles that came up over the course of building the React application.

What's next for MineCart

The web application is intended to serve as a proof of concept for as to how MineCart could be integrated with real retail sites in order to draw traffic and encourage engagement from Minecraft players. In the future, MineCart could partner with retail sites to provide promotions to users in order to foster a relationship both between Minecraft players and retailers as well as between retailers and large Minecraft servers, who could directly integrate the plugin and allow their substantial player-bases the opportunity to earn rewards as they play.