CodeyVillage

Inspiration

Productivity apps are everywhere, but they all have one fundamental weakness: you are alone. It feels empty to get exp for "staying on task" and buying cosmetics if you have no one to show! This is why we decided to build CodeyVillage : a communal building sim that encourages live coding work with friends!

What it does

Our project transforms productivity from a lonely task into a shared social experience.

We built a cozy multiplayer pixel-art island where friends can hang out, work together, and watch their village grow over time. Players earn coins by completing real coding tasks - like making GitHub commits and finishing set focus sessions — which can then be spent on decorations, cosmetics, and upgrades for the shared island.

The world itself reacts to the group’s activity. As players stay productive together, the island becomes more lively and personalized, creating a sense of shared progress and community rather than just another productivity tracker.

CodeyVillage works in 2 steps :

As you do coding work, our chrome extension tracks your Github commits, Leetcode questions you do, as well as completed job applications. Accordingly, you are awarded coins which you can then use in our multiplayer sandbox game to build a communal village with your friend group. You can purchase various decorations and island upgrades through your group's hard work.

We didn't just set out to create a game: your village becomes a living art piece showing the evolution of your personal growth with your friends.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

By taking on building a multiplayer game in <12 hours, we learned just how much work it takes the hard way :

• Threading together all the essential Google and Github apis was tough.
• As a team of 4, commits and pushes were happening constantly. We were forced to return to fundamental development practices and relearn them just so two people's pushes didn't smash head-first into eachother.
• Multiplayer was super tough. It was a challenge to even make our characters appear on the same server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Getting multiplayer to work (finally) and we were overjoyed to see our whole team together on our island!
• Managing to get the hang of a tech stack we've never used before in a few hours.
• Learning how to BUILD A GAME! We had to learn the basics of game development from the ground up.
• (not that proud of this but) pulling a legit all nighter, but at least we were locked in :)

What we learned

• Building a multiplayer game is far more challenging than we expected, especially when dealing with real-time synchronization, networking, and shared game state. WebSockets in particular gave us a tough time throughout development.
• Furthermore, learning an entirely new tech stack under hackathon time pressure forced us to adapt quickly and communicate effectively as a team.
• Most importantly, we learned that productivity tools become much more engaging when they feel social, rewarding, and genuinely fun to use.

What's next for CodeyVillage

Immediate Improvements

• Polishing UI and gameplay.
• Adding better sprites for cosmetics.

Long term plans

• Create a more efficient login pipeline to reduce latency.
• Have a tutorial ready for first-time players.
• Adding custom animations and behaviors to NPCs and other characters
• Expanding islands into interactive social worlds where players can visit friends, explore unique villages, and collaborate on shared community builds as well as adding more decorations, buildings, cosmetics, and customization options.
• Introducing quests, achievements, daily streaks, and seasonal events to keep players engaged long term.
• Expanding CodeyVillage beyond computer science students by supporting productivity systems tailored toward different faculties.

Built With

• ai
• css
• mongodb
• next.js
• phaser.js
• python
• react
• typescript