FIREBALL

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Match Summary

Inspiration

We really like arcade games and thought they haven't really caught up to the times. Also, we're big fans of human augmentation and enhancement, so building better gesture controllers and interfaces is right up the alley of what we're interested in building.

What it does

Allows you to control your wizard with gestures to cast offensive and defensive spells.

How we built it

We built a gesture recognition engine using Mediapipe, and constructed the menu interfaces using a custom Shadcn theme. The rest of the app is just a pretty straightforward Typescript/Vite/React app.

Challenges we ran into

Gesture recognition has to run real-time, on device, and needs to work well with our spell cooldown rules and spell-to-spell interactions (shield spell blocks fireball, for example).

Implementing peer-to-peer video streaming with WebRTC was one of our biggest technical hurdles. We needed players to see each other’s live camera feeds for the gesture-based combat to work, but WebRTC signalling and establishing stable peer connections was tricky. Browser security restrictions added another layer of complexity for proper camera access.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built the whole project while also running a simultaneous event the entirety of Saturday where we had a scavenger hunt across Boston. Also, the game is really fun to play and honestly that's worth way more than the vast majority of "useful" hacks as hackathons so like to talk about.