OctoLink

A social media app that aims to formulate friendships through minigames prompting interaction with new people to tackle the rise of introversion and indecisiveness and cure loneliness during Covid-19.

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Inspiration

We wanted to create a social media app that helps people meet friends by encouraging interaction between strangers. What primarily led to the development of this project was one of our member's, Noor's, personal experience with a friend of hers that underwent depression due to a long period in quarantine. It led to her growing an extreme dependency on Noor as she was very desperate to feel any warmly friendship despite Noor's priority to meet her personal responsibilities. While Noor did all she could to help, she knew she could never fill this void as she was never always available to assist her friend. This thus begged the question, "What if there was a computer that can build this loyalty for people like her with other individuals around the world that need this warmth but are too indecisive to meet new people as well?" Thus, OctoLink was born.

What it does

Our game is essentially a messaging app that groups users through a set of minigames of their choice to give them that push to interact with new people. We value connectivity as our minigames are split by the three fundamentals of what we believe will most effectively build this atmosphere: ideation, cooperation, communication. There are 4 minigames (octogames) to choose from, all of which end with the computer recommend and introduce the user to a new friend based on their performance. The minigames also utilize functions such as dasha.ai and @platform to help interact with users and meet our goals.

How we built it

Through Figma prototyping, we designed a model of how we envisioned our app to look. We also utilized dasha.ai for communication games and @platform for the infrastructure.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was really just the time constraint. We had a whole idea figured out at day 1 and had hoped to use a plethora of sources provided by HackPrinceton to make our submission as sophisticated as possible, but it was the inevitable pressure that really stopped us from meeting all these goals. We additionally ran into several errors throughout the development of our dasha.ai program, but thankfully we still managed to complete it and bring satisfying results.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-Successfully created a working artificial intelligence program. -Managed to complete an app prototype on Figma that absolutely brought our point across.

What we learned

We learned how to use the @sign framework and integrate it into our app to make it a better encrypted messaging place; we also used dasha.ai to our advantage to create a communicating game. In short, we learn new tools that will be extremely helpful in the future.

What's next for OctoLink

OctoLink's friend-finding algorithm could be improved in the future to find similar people with the same playing strategy, personality, or dedication to finish the game. That way, users will be able to find friends that will suit them beyond OctoLink. We hope to facilitate the connections that will tie introverts from all over the world and build a collectively warm atmosphere to help them strive in this catastrophic pandemic.

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