Inspiration
The basis of this program was inspired by our own struggles, and the struggles of other students our age in managing our time. The art was inspired by the nostalgic video game aesthetic with pixel art we'd seen growing up.
What it does
We blend the two elements of time management with cute animation to create an interactive space to make sure you take care of the things on your to do list. This also guarantees a mini serotonin boost each time you accomplish a task, giving you a reward to be the incentive for you to finish each task. It'll drive you to finish your tasks.
How we built it
We designed the visual effects and the art using Piskel which is an online editor. After obtaining our graphics, we built the website using a combination of Javascript, HTML, and CSS.
Challenges we ran into
At the start, we considered building an AR experience using 8th wall, but it quickly proved unfeasible. With the limited time we had left, we tossed together our knowledge in the HTML/CSS/JS languages to create a website with interactive game elements. We decided to make a product that we could use, to manage our productivity while still including animations and mechanics that would be somewhat difficult to make. JavaScript had lots of problems, from it being a single-threaded programming language to all of the small path mistakes that can happen, but after a long effort the project was finished. Challenges can be seen in "rants.txt" on the Github..
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have a complete project with animations and graphics. The graphics were done nicely and the entire website doesn't look like junk. It's not perfect, but this could actually feasibly be used to solve productivity issues.
What we learned
A hackathon might be less beginner friendly than they seem but you get to step out of your comfort zone and learn a lot about yourself as you try to build something actually big with the limited code you might know ;-; You get to meet so many other people who know a lot more than you and show you that there's a lot more to coding than what you just learn in school.
What's next for Expand the Land
As beginner coders, we built a website as that was the most obvious type of interface we could work with. Next time, we hope to make it a mobile app, as it'd be more interactive and easily assessable to open up an app than type up the url for a website. We would want to add more features, such as one to perhaps time the amount of time you'd have to complete a task. One last final thing is just to fix a small bug we left behind, you can select to finish a task that you have already created, granting a free house and one step closer to "winning" but without finishing all of your tasks at all.
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