Dr. Haka's CYOA

It's literally a dating sim but for educational purposes. Use this tool to set up your own virtual tours of different spaces to improve customer or student interaction.

Comment 1

Github Link: https://github.com/haridandapani/VisualStory/

Figma Link: Figma

Long YouTube Video: Link

Online Site: Site

Inspiration

In the time of COVID, we have found it hard to have meaningful interactions with people who you don't know or can't see. For many industries, like real-estate or campus tours, it's become very difficult to interface with potential clients or students. We wanted to create a hosting site that would allow anyone from anywhere to create a visual novel, whether they use it to publish a tour, link users to external resources, or just to share a fun story!

What it does

This app allows people to upload their own visual novels to our hosting site and lets other users try them out. We built a very intuitive and easy-to-use web interface for creating visual novels that allows for a lot of creativity both in terms of art and in terms of story. Play-through is also very straightforward, and users have many options to play their own visual adventures.

How we built it

Using Python Flask and SQLite, we were able to create a dynamic website that reads input from modifiable HTML forms to create a visual novel, including uploaded images. We then store that data into our SQLite file and uploads folder. Other pages of the site, like the playthrough and catalog, pull from the SQLite database and present the information on the page. We use Flask's dynamic URL rerouting tool to allow for a variety of different options of play.

Challenges we ran into

One of our main challenges was integrating the SQL server into our project. We were looking to use Google Cloud for our solution to hold all of our data, but we found the tools available in us in Python to do this were very limited, and, since we were in a time crunch, we decided to just use a SQLite server. However, we plan to use Google Cloud in the future and are currently transitioning since it holds data permanently and is way more scalable.

We also spent a lot of time working on our images, since we wanted a robust catalog available to users as soon as we deployed.

Accomplishments we're proud of

We built a fully working site that allows users to browse and submit their own visual novels! We completed all of the basic parameters of the problem that we set out to solve, which we all find super amazing!!

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to build sites and how to make those sites interface with a backend and with an SQLite server; however, we admittedly still have a lot to learn about how to build apps with cloud technology. We also learned a lot about designing characters for the web and how to make sites that are appealing to look at and intuitive to use.

What's next for Dr. Haka's CYOA

Our three main goals are to add more variety to our existing catalog of visual novels, to migrate to Google Cloud (which we are currently doing) to have a more scalable and broadly usable project, and to find funding to deploy our site to our awesome domain.com domain: visualadventure.space.

We hope to see lots of community involvement in both creating and consuming this virtual choose-your-own-adventure experience. Happy reading!

Share this project:

Updates