FoodGuesser

Inspiration

The inspiration of our project comes from our experiences as children of immigrants, bringing foreign foods to school. Sometimes our lunches would illicit curiosity from our peers. But there were also times where we were made fun of because of the differences in our foods. We believe the website will spark cultural curiosity, but more importantly make you hungry for that next meal!

What it does

Oh poutine, where did you originate? What about French fries? Inspired by GeoGuesser, FoodGuesser is a game which displays a picture of a dish and asks the player to identify the likely country of origin. Guess foods and earn points! Three Steps:

Guess which food the country is from!
Every correct guess results in a point.
Use the photo to your advantage!

Yearly Projection

GeoGuessr follows a game as a subscription model, and bills users $45 CAD annually. At a generous estimate of 5000 users, we can expect the website to be generating $200,00k + every year. Features that allow users to play with friends, play in specific regions, and track progress make the game worth coming back to. And platforms like Twitch.tv bring in recurring audiences as users try to find their favorite streamers in game. Additionally, channels such as GeoWizard have emerged with millions of subscribers at a time when travel was not possible. For these reasons we believe FoodGuesser has major potential to scale .

How we built it

The FoodGuesser backend was made using node.js and express.js, with the images taken from Google's Image API. Google maps API was used to create the selectable map, and the frontend was created with basic HTML and CSS. With the game complete, we simply hosted it on Replit, and began working on our video editing skills.

Challenges we ran into

There were some interesting challenges that emerged during the course of the hackathon. For one, the Google Image API sometimes returned inaccurate photos of the food we want displayed. That was tricky, since it was a core part of the game which was behaving strangely. It was also tricky getting backend Google API requests communicating with our frontend. Since images were generated from the server-side, they took awhile to load. Overall, we are just happy that our application works!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a first time hackathon attendee, I am surprised that we were able to create a functional application in such a short amount of time. It was interesting to learn about the interaction between backend and frontend portions of the code. We were also happy with how the video came out. Overall, it was fun putting everything together and hope you enjoy guessing foods as much as we like eating foods!

What we learned

In this hackathon, we learned how to set up a simple server and connect front-end and back-end portions of the code. Using Premiere Pro, we also learned some ins and outs of video editing.

What's next for FoodGuesser

We hope to expand upon the capabilities of our game by adding more foods, and figuring out ways to automatically generate food varieties for a greater number of countries.