Remote.ly

A social platform for high school and college students to engage with each other and play customizable games with their friends, all remote.ly!

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Inspiration

Staying connected with your friends is hard during COVID, and we all miss having in-person engagements. This is particularly frustrating for teenagers and young adults, who are going through a crucial development period in establishing long term social skills and relationships. We want to create multiplayer games that encourage and emulate in-person social interactions while providing a unique and fresh experience each time you play. Combining inspiration from Beer Buddy and Jackbox, Remote.ly offers a social platform for high school and college students to create and maintain relationships by playing party games virtually and online games together. We provide players with the creative freedom to customize the rules and challenges of each game, resulting in a different experience each time you play. Remote.ly enables teenagers and young adults to bond and build relationships virtually while practicing their creativity and imagination.

What it does

Sign Up

New users have the option to create an account or play as a guest. They will be prompted to select an avatar, add friends, and join groups. The latter two steps may be skipped and the user can always add friends and join groups whenever they’d like. Groups are composed of friends who play together often, making it easier to invite each other to play games and build relationships. In order to join an official school or university group, the user must provide a .edu email address. Users have the option to connect their accounts to Facebook to facilitate the signup process.

Profile Features

Each user profile has a score that increases by the appropriate amount each time they play a game. Users can add their friends by a username and also view their friends list. They can respond to friend requests and also view players nearby. Similarly, users can create or join groups by searching for the group ID, as well as view their list of joined groups.

Game Selection

On the home page, the user can select a game from 3 options: “All Hands on Deck”, “Catch the Fishies”, and “Cup Drop”. After selecting a game, the user will be asked to invite some friends. Those friends will receive an invitation pop up window on their screen, where they can either accept or decline the invitation. Besides automatic score trackers, players can decide on the rules of each game they play.

All Hands on Deck

Players will take turns drawing a random card from a deck, where each number represents a different challenge for the individual to perform. Players may customize the challenge for each number, and the player may choose to perform the task or get eliminated from the game. Players still in the game will earn a point with every card that gets drawn.

Catch the Fishies

Players compete to see who can catch the most number of fishes in the amount of time given. Punishments and rules customizable!

How we built it

  • Google Maps Javascript API: for displaying the user's location and friends nearby
  • Arduino + hardware: sensing the ball for cup drop
  • Jquery and Ajax: read requests and perform the functionalities of the games
  • Adobe XD, HTML/CSS: wireframe and prototyping the design
  • Django

Challenges we ran into

Our team spent lots of time dealing with merge conflicts with git. We also struggled to complete all the features on time as we packed too much content in our game to complete over one weekend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our idea is original and helps alleviate the lack of social interaction during COVID very well. We also created functional mini-games in addition to the general user interface.

What's next for Remote.ly

  • group feature
  • Zoom (video/voice call) feature
  • adding friends by scanning QR codes
  • let users completely customize their own games by inserting an external game link and specifying the game rules/guidelines
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