FiN. | Devpost

Inspiration

Story telling has historically always been an important means of connecting with other people. We wanted to bring this principle into today's online-driven community with a fun twist.

What it does

Users can start their own original stories by pitching a first sentence or contribute to other ones by suggesting what you think will happen next. During each round, each user adds to the story, and all the users will vote on which addition is the best. Because of this, the story can go in many interesting ways, and no story will be the same. Additionally, you can browse through finished stories and relive the creative progression sentence by sentence.

How I built it

Front end was developed with the trandition package of HTML5, CSS, and JS. Additionally, we used Angular.js to enhance the client side experience. In the back end, we used the node.js with express framework to create the foundation of the website. We used socket.io for real time updates during the writing phase of the story and mySQL to store the site's data.

Challenges I ran into

One major issue during development was that we had no dedicated front end developer, so we had to learn and implement front end design on the fly. On the back end side, we also had trouble synchronizing the voting system between server and client sides.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As with any hackathon, coming together to actually finish a project along its 36 hour duration was an achievement that we are proud of accomplishing. Furthermore, as most of us are still only novice web developers, we are proud that we were able to integrate so many technologies together to create a fun and exciting app that I'm sure many will enjoy in the future.

What I learned

Collectively as a team, we gained valuable experience with producing a large scale project with efficient use of git version control. In addition, many of us learned to use new technologies such as socket.io and managed to apply it in such a short span of time.

What's next for FiN.

There are several features that we intended to implement that we didn't end up getting time to do. For example, the front end UI is lacking in interesting or exciting page elements. We also wanted to implement a rating system for the stories so that more popular stories can be shown first on the reading page. User profiles was also another feature that we could have used to give notoriety or credibility to users so that they may have extended privileges or access to higher tiered stories, but unfortunately this idea never came to fruition. Lastly, we wanted to classify stories by different genres. Hopefully we will have time to finish the incomplete parts of our app.