WhereRU | Devpost

Inspiration

For four years now, we've been trying to organize a campus-wide game of tag with our friends, and it still hasn't happened yet. Between exams, social obligations and general laziness, making plans with people to meet up in person and play a game that requires physical activity is a nearly impossible feat. Enter - WhereRU. No longer will you have to leave the comfort of your home to play tag with your friends! Now just launch our webpage, and play a game of virtual tag anytime, anyplace.

What it does

To play the game, go to our web interface link and click play. You can also view the rules by clicking how to play. After one player creates a game, a link to the game room will be sent out to the other players of the game that they can then use to join the room. Then once all the players have joined the room, hiders will have five minutes to evade the hunters. If they overlap with the hunters at any point, they wil join the hunters (manhunt style). The game ends either once time has fully elapsed or once there are no more hiders.

How we built it

We split our project into several different parts and then assigned those parts amongst ourselves. Essentially, the parts were as follows: streetview functionality, the rules of manhunt, front-end of the web interface, back-end of the web interface, server to client interaction and implementation of each part in the other parts.

Challenges we ran into

Our team ran into several obstacles along the way for this project. We were all dealing with concepts that we were unfamiliar with including the Google Maps API's Streetview functionality, client and server interaction and Python implementation in a web page. At multiple points we dealt with errors that we spent hours troubleshooting. Additionally there were multiple avenues that we began pursuing for our program but then later abandoned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We feel that this is the most exciting and fun program that we've created of all the projects that we've been a part of at Rutgers. We all took on challenging new concepts and evenly worked on them to the best of our ability, and in doing so we produced an end-result that we're extremely proud of.

What we learned

Some new concepts that we dealt with include the Google Maps API's Streetview functionality, client and server interaction, the Google Cloud Platform's webhosting technology and Python implementation in a web page.

What's next for WhereRU

In the future we would like to implement a system of random matchmaking lobbies for ease of use for the players. We also want to eventually bring the game to other platforms and devices such as an iOS and Android app.