CollaboWrite

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Inspiration

As part of my school's creative writing club, we sometimes play some writing games to help our creativity flow, and CollaboWrite lets us participate in one of my favourites. Starting with a prompt, each user gets to write a single sentence of a story. When they've finished a sentence, control gets passed onto the next user, who only gets to see the previous sentence written in the story. By the end, a story is created as a result of the fun and collaborative efforts of everybody in the room.

How we built it

We used a Node.js backend to register users, track active rooms, and save stories.

WebSockets allowed us to maintain active connections between each of the clients so that actions taken during the collaborative effort would feel more instantaneous.

We both had experience with iOS dev, so we decided to being with iOS, and leave Android to the end if we had time. Unfortunately, we didn't!

Challenges we ran into

The workload ended up being too much for us. We finished a number of the features separately on the front and back end, but didn't have time to connect the two.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting WebSockets working and learning how to effectively maintain a number of open connections.

What we learned

Don't bite off more than you can chew, and try to pick an idea to work on EARLY.