Cosmic Consumer

Inspiration

The hackathon prompt got me thinking about space, and I landed on a dumb-fun idea: what if you could just flick planets into a black hole with your hand? Tactile, a little chaotic, easy to explain in one sentence. That was basically the whole pitch.

What it does

You've got 60 seconds. Planets float around, black hole in the middle. Drag them in, bigger planets = more points, try to beat your best score. Two control modes: hand gestures via webcam, or just mouse if the webcam thing isn't your vibe.

How we built it

Cursor + Codex did most of the heavy lifting on code, VS Code for anything I wanted to poke at manually, deployed on Vercel so I could test changes live almost instantly. Pretty AI-assisted build overall given the time crunch.

Challenges we ran into

Hand-gesture tracking was the pain point. Getting it to actually feel responsive (not just "technically work") took a lot of trial and error — lighting and webcam quality changed how well it picked up gestures, and any lag made grabbing a planet feel off. Mouse mode ended up being a necessary fallback more than an afterthought.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting gesture controls working at all in the time we had feels like the win. It's easy to say "control it with your hand" and much harder to make that actually feel good to play — so having a version where flicking a planet toward the black hole feels satisfying, not janky, is what we're most proud of. Also just... shipping something playable end-to-end (start screen, timer, scoring, best-score tracking, live deploy) in a hackathon timeframe.

What we learned

Camera-based input is way messier than keyboard/mouse — you're filtering noisy signal into something that feels intentional. Also: being specific with AI coding tools ("less floaty drag") gets much better results than vague asks.