#32 Cryptopoly: Monopoly to the Moon

Inspiration

WFH and Zoom U have their perks, but they can also take their toll. We wanted to create a witty and fun game that was easy to play while also bringing in material that is both current and nostalgic. Sometimes we all need a break that's a bit of risk, a bit of strategy, and 100% a great experience.

What it does

Cryptopoly hosts a web browser board game that allows two players to buy properties and vie for $$ just like in traditional Monopoly. Land on NFT/Crypto spots though, and you enter the digital age - big time (where everything is great ;)). Buy and sell popular cryptocurrencies with real-time market price trends and see your fate as their prices rise and fall.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Bootstrap to build out the game's frontend. We created the game logic in Java. On the backend, we used Google Cloud (G-Cloud) to setup a virtual machine that loops a Python script for webscrapping. Price Updates in Python or PUP as we call like to call it uses Panda Dataframes to pull data from Yahoo Finance cryptocurrency HTML tables. PUP then reads in old price data from G-Cloud storage. Next, PUP calculates changes in prices and writes CSV files back to G-Cloud. We link our frontend and backend using Jquery and PapaParse to directly read in price changes from G-Cloud.

Challenges we ran into

Finding crypto data that doesn't shut down your mood with 403 forbidden messages can be hard, but Yahoo Finance came through. We also ran into issues using the built-in Yfinance package for Python on our virtual machine, so we had to come up with our own solution using Dataframes. Also, even the data we could get doesn't update quite as fast as we would like, so we incorporated rules to move prices even if internet data was showing a flat price. Need to keep it riveting you know. Linking the data from the G-Cloud storage into the game also proved challenging as we had to ensure CORS permissions were set up properly. Last but certainly not least, the logic of combining old-school Monopoly with the world of Crypto required a lot of discussions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First and foremost, we're really proud of creating something we think is F-U-N! Second, we did our best to produce something that was easy to play but used a full-stack of development tools. As a team, we are also proud that we helped each other learn new skills and shared knowledge amongst ourselves.

What we learned

This in many ways ties into the above, but we digress... As students all pursuing Masters programs related to CS but coming from non-CS backgrounds, we are really proud to compete in our first hackathon. With that comes a steep learning curve (which means a lot of learning!). Some of us learned Javascript for the first time. We all were new to G-Cloud, and we learned a lot about exploiting the power of virtual machines. Finally, our initial optimism led to a lot of good learning about the joys of linking different data sources and code bases together.