Hackbox

Edward did it
Mix and match answers

Inspiration

We love Jackbox Party games but we wished we could play it with friends across the country without having to stream the main screen. We wanted the party game... without the party! We, a small, tight-knit group of friends, wanted to make a game for a small, tight-knit group of friends to enjoy anywhere, and at any time. If find yourself away from friends, but still want to play games, Hackbox is for you!

What it does

Hackbox is a game formatted very similarly to Jackbox games where players all play from their own devices. However, unlike Jackbox, the need for the main screen is eliminated as everyone sees the same screens on their devices.

Here's how the game works: Everyone who logs on to play will be given a prompt. Once everyone responds to that prompt, each player will receive a list of everyone's answers displayed next to the list of all the players. Each player will then try to correctly guess who gave what answers in order to score more points. The better they are at guessing who said what correctly, the more they will score!

How we built it

We wrote our project in Python and utilized Google Drive/Google Sheets APIs in order to use a Google Sheet as our "server". Using GitHub, each member of our team worked on a different page of the game sequence and put them together.

Challenges we ran into

There are many edge cases that cause our game to crash. For example, if you input an answer with a comma or with too many characters, the program will crash. Also, there are no restrictions when matching two items, so if you press two items from the same column, the program will crash as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made a product that is functional for the most part. This was also our first time building anything that involved the communication between different devices!

What we learned

We learned how to implement Google Drive / Google Sheets API to act as a server. We learned how to use GitHub more efficiently and how important modularizing collaborative projects are.

What's next for Hackbox

In the future, we plan on setting up an actual server instead of using the Google Sheets shortcut. There is a lot of lag and the program won't run if too many people input at the simultaneously.