DungeonGo

DungeonGo turns your neighborhood into a living RPG. Daily AI quests send kids outside to explore, collaborate, and connect. Put the phone down. Live the story. Your world is the dungeon.

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Inspiration

  • Time is the one thing we can never get back. We asked ourselves how kids and parents actually spend time together today
  • Childhood imaginative play, the kind that happens outside with friends and family fully present, is disappearing
  • We wanted to bring it back, but smarter
  • If Dungeons and Dragons and Pokémon GO had a kid, designed specifically for families to adventure together in the real world, that's DungeonGo

What it does

  • Transforms a child's real neighborhood into a living, AI-generated RPG using Google Gemini
  • Generates fully personalized quests based on the child's interests, character class, live location, and real-time weather data.
  • Kids explore real places, solve riddles tied to their actual surroundings, and complete tasks that get them outside and moving
  • Parents join as Dungeon Masters, receiving their own legendary character woven directly into the narrative and guiding the adventure in real time
  • Friends join via shareable links and are assigned complementary characters that appear in the story
  • Google Maps integration overlays a dark fantasy aesthetic onto the real neighborhood, renaming local landmarks into quest destinations
  • When a child logs what they found on their real-world task, Gemini reads their input and advances the story around exactly what they experienced, making every child the literal author of their own adventure

How we built it

  • React and Tailwind CSS for the frontend, deployed on Netlify
  • Firebase as the intended backend, pivoted to localStorage and client-side caching after a critical incident (see Challenges)
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash API for all dynamic content: character creation, quest generation, story advancement, and fantasy location renaming
  • Google Maps JavaScript API for the neighborhood map with custom fantasy styling and quest markers
  • OpenWeatherMap API for real-time weather context injected into every quest prompt
  • AI coding agents including OpenAI Codex, Claude, and Cursor used to accelerate development across the full stack

Challenges we ran into

  • A recursive bug in our database write logic caused a runaway loop, resulting in over 50,000 Gemini API calls and 15,000 Firebase writes in under five minutes
  • This exhausted both our API quota and our database limits entirely
  • We had to abandon the Firebase instance, spin up fresh accounts to restore API access, and pivot to localStorage to keep the demo alive
  • This was our single largest setback, costing a significant portion of our total build time

Accomplishments we're proud of

  • Built, deployed, and demoed a working MVP of DungeonGo in under 24 hours
  • One member of our team was attending their very first hackathon
  • We stayed up, edited the video, and we put something real on the screen

What we learned

  • Recursive logic and real-time APIs are a dangerous combination, always instrument your write and call frequency before going live
  • Fully mapping out backend and data architecture before writing any code would have saved us hours
  • More planning on the technical architecture side is just as important as the idea itself

What's next for DungeonGo

  • Dedicated parent Dungeon Master dashboard with narrative controls and quest customization
  • Richer onboarding and persistent player profiles via a properly architected database
  • AI-generated imagery that transforms real photos of the child's surroundings into fantasy scenes
  • Audio narration for each quest chapter
  • Full separation of child and parent interfaces so every member of the party gets an experience designed for their role (player and "dungeon master")
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