HuskiesPaws

GIF
Intro GIF
The Map View
Pet Equip View
AR View
Leaderboard View
Album View

Inspiration

Navigation apps get you somewhere as fast as possible, alone, staring at a blue line. We wanted the opposite: a reason to take the walk, notice the buildings you pass every day, and come back to them. Games like Pokémon GO and Pikmin Bloom showed that people will walk for a creature collection, so we asked: what if your pets were your navigation?

What it does

HuskiesPaws turns walking around campus into a pet-collecting adventure built on real places.

A squad of pets that navigates for you. Your Scout explores and finds a real nearby landmark (from Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap), walks out to it on the map and comes back with a postcard: a real photo and a real fact, with the source linked. Your Pathfinder plans a walking route there, and your Storyteller reads the landmark's history aloud in a narrator's voice.
Your trail blooms. Every step leaves flowers on the map; walking earns XP to climb from Bronze to Crystal leagues, each unlocking a new flower trail.
Eggs hatch from walking only. Meadow, Forest and Crystal eggs hatch after 300 m, 600 m or 1 km; longer eggs hatch rarer pets. Six species, four classes, four rarities, and a hatch reveal. Rare pets are more likely while the ISS is passing overhead, using live orbital data.
Claim real landmarks. Every real landmark near you is a food bag on the map. Walk within 60 m and leave a pet to guard it, or challenge a rival's guard in a 3D head-bashing battle with HP bars. Guards heal slowly, and each landmark you hold boosts your walking XP.
AR squad view. Point your phone at the floor and your squad appears in 3D. Turn away and they stay put in the room, then run over to where you're looking.
Leaderboards for your town, state and country, and an iMessage agent that lets you play by text, using your squad's names.

How we built it

Phone app: Expo SDK 57 / React Native, running in Expo Go. Maps with react-native-maps (tilted, with 3D buildings), camera capture with expo-camera, step counting with the pedometer.
3D and AR: React Three Fiber and three.js on expo-gl. Pets are built from rounded blocks with cel shading and a painted face decal (generated in code). AR uses the phone's motion sensors to move the 3D camera with the phone.
Server: a dependency-free Node API that holds every secret and serves voice, leaderboards and turf (claims, battles, HP). Bot rivals guard eight real Cornell landmarks so there's always someone to fight.
Shared game logic in plain JavaScript, used by the app, the server and the iMessage agent, with tests for every rule (leagues, eggs, rarity odds, claims).
Real data: Wikipedia geosearch and summaries for places and facts, OpenStreetMap/Nominatim and OSRM for regions and walking routes, wheretheiss.at for the ISS.
Voice: ElevenLabs text-to-speech for stories (from the server, never from the phone); on-device speech for everything else.
iMessage: a Photon Spectrum agent sharing the same game logic.
We built it with AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code and Codex), and logged key prompts in CURSOR_LOG.md.

Challenges we ran into

"Freezes" that weren't freezes. Landmarks seemed to lock the app. We added a heartbeat log and found the JavaScript thread was fine: the landmark screen was reopening itself, because iOS re-selected the map marker after we refreshed it. A one-line guard fixed it.
3D on a phone's JavaScript thread. On Expo every graphics call shares the thread that handles taps. We capped rendering at 30 fps, preloaded the 3D code and replaced a dozen face meshes with one painted texture, doubling the frame rate.
Real places are dense. Campus landmarks sit 20–30 m apart, so one spot could claim several. We spaced landmarks 130 m apart and set a 60 m claim range, so you're only ever in range of one.
Two people, two coding agents, one repo. We split the work by layer (backend vs. presentation) and merged many times a night. Some merges silently undid each other, which taught us to run tests and lint on every merge.
Infrastructure surprises: Expo's shared ngrok tunnel was full (we switched to a Cloudflare tunnel), and we hit API credit and key-permission limits mid-demo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A full loop that works on a real phone: explore → walk → hatch → claim → battle, on real campus landmarks.
3D battles and an AR squad view running inside Expo Go, with no custom native build.
Facts that come only from real sources: our pets never make up a fact about a place, and every postcard links to its source.

What we learned

Measure before fixing: one heartbeat log saved hours of guessing about performance.
Design for the demo floor: a demo mode with simulated walks, offline fallbacks for every online feature, and secrets kept only on the server.
Game balance is mostly geometry: claim range vs. landmark spacing decided whether turf felt fair.