Route Infinity

Inspiration

Buying a car is one of the biggest financial decisions young adults face, yet the process is often confusing, biased, and overwhelming. Traditional dealership tools don't personalize recommendations based on real human preferences like lifestyle, goals, or financial comfort. We wanted to reimagine vehicle discovery as an interactive journey and gamification to make it fun, fair, and insight-driven.

What it does

Our app transforms the car-buying process into a race experience: Users answer a series of curated lifestyle and financial questions. A decision tree processes the user inputs and dynamically eliminates vehicles until one model wins the race to the finish line. The result page automatically generates:

User profile + preference breakdown
Match scores for top models
Finance vs lease payment simulations
Smart recommendations and next steps

How we built it

We built Route Infinity using Phaser.js for the interactive driving experience, integrating a Node/Express backend that powers the conversational flow and question logic. The chatbot uses text-to-speech with ElevenLabs for an immersive audio experience and dynamically updates based on user inputs. The frontend blends HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to merge the cosmic racing environment with an accessible, gamified chatbot UI.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating the chatbot seamlessly with the Phaser game was a big challenge, keeping both responsive while maintaining immersion. We also faced issues with balancing aesthetics and accessibility, optimizing real-time voice feedback, and managing transitions between storytelling and gameplay without breaking the flow. Debugging texture rendering and ensuring the chatbot logic synced with backend question trees took time, but taught us a lot about UI synchronization and modular design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built an end-to-end gamified experience in less than 24 hours. Created a fully responsive Celestial Automotive UI from scratch. Integrated realistic finance simulations with UX that anyone can understand. Developed a reusable analyst dashboard for product scaling.

What we learned

The power of gamification in decision-making tools. How UX deeply influences trust and engagement in financial products. Implementing dark/light theme consistency at scale. Building modular frontend pages that can dynamically adapt to user data.

What's next for HackTX Project

Integrating chat for real-time coaching. Personal finance optimization using credit history and income projections. API integration with real Toyota inventory + live pricing. Expanding beyond Toyota: allowing cross-brand comparisons. Turning this into a full dealership onboarding tool or customer-facing configurator.