Erudite Me

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Inspiration

During the COVID-19 outbreak people have to adapt to new conditions. The public events are closed, we have to stay at home and forget about the events which usually made us socialized, for example, public erudition games. In Riga with just under 1 million people there are at least 10 well known erudition quiz organizers, the most prominent league being around 300 teams playing every day on a 2-week cycle with around 30 teams (in each there are 6 people) playing each day. How to accept quarantine and self-isolation when it is not possible to do the things we love? How to overcome the emotional tension? How to spend quality time with friends and like-minded people, socialize and make some fun time?

What it does

Our solution is to offer online erudition game “Erudite Me” which helps quarantined or self-isolated people to get socialized, meet and spend quality time with their friends and like-minded people at the same time challenging their knowledge and erudition. The game is based on the pub erudition games with rules adapted to be played in a smaller group, individually. It’s highly entertaining and instantly helps to take the mind off of the daily tension. Want to learn new interesting facts? Are you a competitive person? Do you know a lot of trivia about your favorite book? Are you into academic sciences or pop culture? This game just might be for you.

How we built it

While thinking about the technology stack we mostly focused on scalability and flexibility of the platform. As we are building a game, or first initial instinct was to build a DirectX application, but after some market analysis we realized that most of our auditory wouldn’t be using Steam market and does not want to install anything on their computers, therefore we chose to create a web application. The initial stack of technologies were React, JavaScript. Node.js and Firebase No SQL database.

Challenges we ran into

While working on data retrieval of the most complex queries and data analysis it was noticed that we are hitting some hard limits of Firebase No SQL. Our queries were too sophisticated for the engine and would either take a really big effort to redevelop and readjust or would cost a lot to host and maintain.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We properly analyzed the requirements and had a lot of progress in researching and improving our marketing strategy. We managed to define our future plans and to create a clear road map of what are we trying to achieve and the time frame. We spent a lot of time on some quality content creation for the game which was not in vain, also we created an initial design and developed the character of the game. Many of the created assets will be used in the actual game which we will continue developing.

What we learned

During this time of remote work the biggest challenge is communication. Everyone needs to be on the same page – there were quite many instances where team members had different take on the requirements. This is mostly caused by the remote format of the hackathon – there are less informal discussions which means that people are sharing their thoughts less, which may lead to severe misunderstandings. Technologically we learned that we need to do a better work at estimating the loads and the complexity of data structures, as well as invest more time into technology research. We have decided to continue in the direction of Elasticsearch as our primary database.

What's next for Erudite Me

The game has the potential also after the COVID-19 crisis – there are pub owners or corporations who would like us to make their job with entertainment easier, there are people who would love to play this at party several years from now with even more questions, even more game modes and specific categories (for example, guessing only the music). And more – you won’t be needed to read the questions, there will be Erudite who will be reading the questions. This game could be widely used in various ways.