Professor GO

Home dashboard page
Map to discover the home
Map to discover the school.
recruit a professor (gatcha)
Inside the school map

Inspiration

We wanted to turn the chaotic, funny, and surprisingly competitive world of university life into a game. Professors, course debates, Piazza posts, campus rumors, and class performance all felt like a perfect source for a playful battle system. The idea came from imagining a campus where each professor is a character, each course has its own personality, and students can recruit, battle, and strategize around academic identity.

Professor GO combines that fantasy with a more practical hackathon goal: build a full MVP that feels like a game, but is grounded in a believable student experience.

What it does

Professor GO is a campus-themed game prototype where players can:

create an account and log in
earn and spend tokens
recruit professors through a gacha-style system
view professor stats and rarity
answer coding questions to earn more tokens
build a roster and imagine future battle scenarios
explore a prototype experience that blends academics, gamification, and campus culture

The app also supports key systems such as:

player accounts and authenticated sessions
persistent local SQLite storage
token-based rewards
professor roster generation
question generation with Gemini API
future-ready hooks for battles, trading, and campus events

How we built it

We built the project as a Vite-powered frontend and a TypeScript backend API.

Frontend: React + Vite
Backend: Node.js + TypeScript + Express
Database: SQLite
Authentication: Better Auth
AI question generation: Gemini API
Styling: custom UI with a playful campus / battle-card aesthetic

The system is structured around a clear ownership model:

players have accounts and token balances
professors are stored in a shared pool
inventory tracks each player’s collected professors
token rewards and question answers are validated on the server

This keeps the project flexible enough to grow into more complex gameplay later.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was designing a system that felt like a real game without overbuilding too early. We had to balance:

a believable professor roster and gacha model
secure authentication with persistent sessions
token systems and reward logic
question generation that could work with or without AI
making the app feel cohesive while still keeping a clear MVP scope

We also had to keep the architecture manageable while avoiding the trap of building too much unproven logic at once.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re especially proud of building a working prototype that includes:

functioning account creation and login
persistent user state
token economy and rewards flow
professor pool and inventory logic
coding question generation
a runnable Vite + backend setup
a clean project structure for future expansion

The app already feels like a game foundation rather than just a mockup, and that makes it easy to keep expanding.

What we learned

We learned that a strong MVP is about choosing the right layers to build first. Instead of jumping straight into a full battle system or a large multiplayer feature set, we focused on the foundational pieces:

game identity
account flow
backend logic
reward loop
player progression

This gave us a much clearer sense of how the rest of the game could be layered on top.

We also learned how valuable it is to combine a proper game loop with a strong thematic concept. Academic life, campus culture, and professor archetypes are inherently fun to turn into game mechanics.