Inspiration
We wanted a niche productivity tool that helps coders stay focused even through the many distractions in the digital world. Specifically, we target doom scrolling and social media usage.
What it does
Our VSCode/Cursor extension creates a digital pet that traverses the bottom left of the IDE. Each time you are on social media or idling, this character sits down and starts eating chips. Over time, the character grows larger and larger. The goal of a developer is to keep their pet a healthy size by never using social media or doom scrolling while they are supposed to be working (i.e. have their IDE open).
How we built it
Our project has three components. A VSCode extension frontend, a database server, and a chrome extension to track our social media usage. The VSCode extension’s job is to display the user’s DevBuddy for the vibes. The server database stores and calculates every user’s DevBuddy and the chrome extension is used to detect chrome social media usage.
Challenges we ran into
Our greatest challenges were general development and ideation. For this hackathon, we knew we wanted to participate in Interactive Media but struggled to find the right idea. We spent a lot of time trying to come up with more grand ideas but ultimately decided that sticking with our cute small scope game was the right move for us. Because we took so long ideating, we had less time to develop and that took a toll on us. We still completed everything we wanted, but we are very tired!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Because we’re in the interactive media track, we wanted our project to be tasteful. Instead of making a pure game, we wanted to make a game-productivity tool hybrid. We’re very proud of the overall feel of our project which we achieved through careful animation and sprite design. Additionally, we’re proud of how we connected implemented the distraction logic so that DevBuddy is sad if you’re not working.
What we learned
There were some technical issues in development so we learned to start coding a bit earlier next time. Specifically, we tried to incorporate many technologies from different prize tracks but found that it opened us up to many bugs. We decided to reduce the scope for the sake of completeness. Another thing we learned is that art/media doesn’t need to be complicated to be enjoyable. We’re very happy with our product even with its small scope.
What's next for DevBuddy
We want to implement a wide variety of different pets and animations that each user can customize to their personal preference. This would greatly expand on the single pet, single action animation we currently have. Additionally, we hope to bring our program to mobile apps. That was the vector we were originally hoping to target: where the developer’s virtual pet is affected by doom scrolling on their mobile device. However, we were limited by the need for Apple’s Developer Program in order to create an app that can use their Screen Time API. In the future, we would spend more time adding even more productivity vectors.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.