We were inspired by the original game, called the pastanaga, which consists of eliminating other players by touching them with a carrot: You are only given the name of a player (that you know it's a student), and you have to find him and "kill him with the carrot". If you are successful, next, you will have to kill the person your last victim was trying to "kill", until there's just one winner. We thought that this hackathon would be a great opportunity to bring this awesome game to more people in the unviersity context by using technology to play it.
It is a complete mobile game, for both, Android and iOS, with power-upsand awesome animations. It uses FIB API v2 to get UPC schedules from the students, and using geolocation services, it is able to know if students are in class, rewarding them with virtual coins if that's so. The students can buy different powerups to help them find their "victims", and can try to kill them with the app, again, using geolocation services. We think this will motivate students to go to class, meet new people and create a community. We also have an admin pannel to manage all the different games and players, and a landing page to advertise our product.
The three members of the team were already familiar with react native and we decided to use it for our front end of the app. We decided to use GraphQL for the backend since we thought it was interesting to learn and we could benefit from it.
We had smooth sailing from the begginning... Just kidding, it is a software project ;). We ran into some problems trying to communicate the admin app and the server because of some CORS policy the server had activated by default. We also ran into some other problems that we were able to solve after some time thinking about them.
We are proud of designing the UI/UX in such a short period of time and obtaining a result I am quite proud of. It is really user friendly and just complex enough that the user can dive into it without fear but with a good sense of exploration and have a lot of fun! We also think we have a cool product, a playable game, and a robust implementation. We know it is posible to play it without any major inconveniences!
We learned a lot about patterns in react and react native, how to do them better and how to optimize them. We also learned how to optimize our time to put out the most work in the least amount of time possible.
We hope we can bring the app into production if the campus wants to implement it so the students can have some fun and also be incentivized to come to class.