David, Goliath, & Skylines

start screen
match session
Goliath's view
David's view

Inspiration:

Land, water bodies, roads, street blocks – they all weave a texture for every city. And we are inspired by those unique textures of the cities in the world. That is why we wanted to create an experience that would allow people to experience and discover cities by the textures.

What it does:

This project is a multiplayer game of two or more players utilizing ThreeJS elements in Maps API. The players will assume two roles: an overcasting catcher– Goliath, and a human-sized flyer – David. They will be placed in a random city where the texture is one of iconic significance, with their views blanked. The goal of Goliath is to find and catch David, while David’s goal would be to identify the place they are in. Both need to construct a picture of their surroundings in order to achieve their goals: Goliath does so by clicking on the masked map to reveal parts of it, and David by “flying” around the map.

How we built it

We built the environment using Map Customization API and WebGLOverlayView, and the interactive components using Firebase, Autocomplete API and WebGLOverlayView. And the whole experience is deployed with gh-pages.

Challenges we ran into

Timeframe: We discovered the Hackathon and started really REALLY late: only a week from the submission deadline. So it was a time crunch for everything from designing to implementation. And everything was therefore aimed to be its minimally viable product. Implementation & Ideation: We had envisioned more interactive components for this project, but due to their complexities in integrating with GMP and the timeframe, we resigned to working within our limitations. Sp we had to pivot the project two days before the deadline because our developer found our original idea to be unrealistic.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

That we actually made (to some extent) what we originally envisioned!

What we learned

It’s better to start early!

What's next

Despite the challenges, we were really passionate about our idea, and we had really started to look forward to being able to play this game ourselves, and we could see how people could enjoy the experience. And we think this project has substantial potential with the way we envisioned it in its final form. So regardless of the outcome of this Hackathon, we will continue to develop our ideas to fruition and create a truly matured, sustainable game.