Inspiration
Our inspiration comes mainly from the ongoing pandemic and our love of games. We wanted to make a game that was educational, but also fun! Our goal was to expand COVID-19 knowledge to a younger audience through unique gameplay.
What it does
Co-opvid is at heart a trivia game, and we made sure it is both unique and simple to play. When you go onto our site, you'll see a how-to play collapsible, a "create a game" box, and a lobby that shows you any game that you can join. Each game is composed of eight questions (multiple choice), and there are two teams (automatically assigned), unless the user decides to play on his or her own. The goal of each game is to fill in the missing letters of a word by answering COVID-related questions. If you get the question correct, one letter will go into the right spot. However, if you get it wrong, an incorrect letter will go into that spot. You can use the previous letters to help you guess if you can't narrow the answer down to one choice. A team's score is determined by the team's accuracy and speed.
How we built it
We built the front end with plain HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. We built the backend with node.js and the socket.io library. Using socket.io made the live communication between the server and the client very straightforward. To organize all the questions, we made a spreadsheet with the questions and the correct answer along with the distraction choices. We exported this as a .csv file and used a node.js module to import it as a json file.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest impediment was writing the code. Figuring out a way to have different games all running at the same time, while also keeping track of the score to give an end screen, proved to be a challenge. Also, the sheer amount of questions we had to think of and fact-check was daunting. We spent a lot of time thinking about what a fun and approachable, yet unique, multiplayer trivia game should look like.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Making the game work properly, of course! We also are proud of our simple UI and the variety of questions we have.
What we learned
We learned a lot about cooperation and working together as a team. We also had a lot of fun. Everyone improved their coding skills and became more knowledgable about COVID-19 and health in general.
What's next for Co-opvid
If we improve on Co-opvid, we will add a user system where you can login. This could allow us to implement a scoreboard or rating system. Additionally, we would allow long term users to submit their own questions and answers. These would be fact checked and put into the question list. Finally, a more sophisticated game creation system would be implemented. You could create private games, manage how many teams there are, etc.
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