Dashy Duck

mascot

Dashy Duck

Inspired by Tamagotchi games, Dashy Duck is a virtual duck whose emotions depend on the user's physical activity to stay healthy and alive. Dashy Duck monitors a user's movement based on their phone's internal Gyroscope. The more the user walks, the happier and healthier the duck becomes. As the user becomes more inactive, the duck's health will decline and eventually perish, or enter a dormant state until the user becomes active again.

Development & Challenges

To create this app, we used Flutter to develop our app, Android Studio to emulate the experience, and the Sensors Plus package of Dart to add the Gyroscope. To start, we first laid out what the interface of our app would look like as a team. Then, we had to decide between Swift and Flutter for development and began exploring how Flutter Studio developed. As two of our members began to work on the back end, the other two split up between working on integrating the Gyroscope API and drawing/animating the ducks and images we'd use in the final app development. As we worked through the night, we ran into a few roadblocks with animating the duck in-app, as we were unsure how to implement it. Additionally, we struggled with setting criteria for what was considered 'walking' while tracking movement with the Gyroscope and testing this function. This also became an issue with testing since none of our teams had Androids, and we had to borrow our friend's. Lastly, due to issues installing and running Flutter, only two of our teammates could program at a time, leading us to pair-program.

Takeaways

Coming to Hacklahoma, our team had never participated in a hack before or worked in app development. As we continue to get better in Flutter following today, we hope to improve Dashy Duck and break into using Geolocation, creating a more complex UI, and turning the app into a widget instead to place a greater focus on reducing time looking at technology. Additionally, we'd like to improve our animation as our current app only uses 11 frames at a 500 ms delay between images. In terms of Dashy Duck's future, we believe that Dashy Duck is just the start of our app development journey rather than an end product, and ultimately view this hack as a launchboard into more complex projects.