Uncommon Hacks 2025

Arcade Multiverse - interactive content generator

This year's theme was retro games, and we were inspired to do some in-depth research on the history of arcade games and how they often reflect and occasionally affect the culture and current events at the time. As we learned more about arcade games, we found that the more successful and enduring ones often had consistently engaging characters and storylines that drew the public's attention. We felt we could make an impact by increasing people's engagement with historical arcade games utilizing a very modern and lighthearted tool-- fanfiction! Users can choose a period and game, and a short fanfiction based on these prompts will be returned. Our project currently uses Gemini AI to generate these different stories based on our various input parameters. For some of us, this was our first time coding, so this is simply our prototype version - with more time, we would expand this project to include more user input, changing up the variability in our AI. Our project is made with a Python backend (creating prompts based on user input interacting with the Gemini AI) that we then interfaced with our HTML frontend using Flask. Our HTML frontend is full of handmade designs, which we created in Procreate. For 4/5 of our team members, this was their first hackathon! And we did not have any previous html/experience working with frontends, so it was tough at first but we are super proud of how far we came! Our most significant takeaways are further comfort using Python functions and learning how to make an endless amount of HTML web pages with absolutely anything you could imagine. But perhaps the best lesson learned was that collaboration is essential-- each of our team members brought unique perspectives and ideas into the challenge, which is what made our project so fun! If we had further time to work on our project, we would figure out how to allow for multiple buttons at a time to be selected to increase user input (ie. multiple characters could be combined by the users) - this was our initial goal, but we were unable to apply it to our code so far. We would also further specify the types of stories the AI would generate and create different types of prompts accordingly.