Arbora

in-game

Inspiration

We were looking at the Chrome's dinosaur game as our internet was setting up and realized - this dinosaur game gets a LOT of screen-time and views, and that equals attention.

We felt like directing this attention to a relevant cause would be great. But we realized that getting people to act upon and benefit others from this page would be amazing.

What better way to do this than Gamification? What better way to Gamify any application than to make it a game!

What it does

Arbora is a web application that's a game. It's your own virtual garden, that you have to tend to, and take care of. Your character has the ability to water trees, collect and plant seeds, and (in the future) visit others gardens, style yourself and create multiple rooms!

How we built it

This was our first experience with game development. We used React to make it web-based, used an open source tutorial, and react-three-fiber to power the graphics, animation and physics for the game. It uses Typescript and Next.js under the hood to deploy.

Challenges we ran into

Being our first time with game dev, we ran into a lot of challenges. But we persevered for the learning experience and because each incremental iteration of the game made the application that makes it that much more exciting!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a working version of the app - we struggled until 2 hours before submission to even get it running! Needless to say understanding the engine and mechanics was new even to us - who have done software engineering roles before

What we learned

Game dev is hard. But it's also equally rewarding. Moreover it has strong potential to capture attention, and that attention can be used for great causes. Definitely will dive more into this in the future!

What's next for Arbora

Multiplayer rooms, Premium Features, better graphics and more collectibles! But on the business side we plan to partner up and get this project running