Cali-Jam

What would traffic look like in a carpool and public transit world?

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Inspiration

One of our team members, Lauren, has had work commutes that lasted over 3 hours a day. After getting a job that included a commuter bus ticket, her experience getting home completely changed for the better. After discussing our interest in the traffic congestion topic we decided to focus on offering alternative transportation ideas, we used stories like hers as inspiration for what we wanted to promote on our website and in our game.

What it does

Our website builds awareness not only for the problem of traffic congestion, but also offers a fun driving game to highlight the difference between a solo driving trip and one where the road is cleared up by the use of carpools and buses.

How we built it

Two of our team members (Benjamin and Bhargavi) focused on researching the topic thoroughly and building our website on react and bootstrap. The other two members (Lauren and William) created our game in Unity using C#.

Challenges we ran into

None of our team members had ever tried game development, and most were inexperienced with web development. We chose to challenge ourselves by working in these areas anyway, as we had personal interest in working with them. Our Unity group in particular had difficulty creating the UI for our game, which involved several hours of debugging to make work. There are some parts of our game implementation we were unable to complete, however we see these as future improvements to make.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud to have well-researched information on the traffic congestion problem, as well as a polished website to display it on. We're also very proud to have completed a game with a functional UI and multiple levels.

What we learned

Some of our team members used GitHub for the first time, others learned how to work Unity, and we all were able to gain more experience in working on a development team.

What's next for Cali-Jam

In the future, we’d love to do more to make the game challenging, and to accurately reflect a traffic commute. We’re thinking of a timer, moving cars, scores, penalties for hitting other cars, et cetera. More importantly, we would like to help people find options to change their commute by adding more resources for people to find carpools and public transportation near them, as well as donate to causes helping spread availability of these options.

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