Inspiration
After our first college semester spent almost fully online, we realized that social stimulation and bonding is really hard to come by, especially during COVID. We greatly enjoy local mini-games such as those hosted on JackBox.tv, and wanted to create our own tiny replica in the name of breaking the ice: IceToMeetYou.online.
What it does
Our project hosts three minigames, each supporting multiplayer access. The first we planned to be a matching game where the user matches their classmates' profile pictures, but we didn't get to the photo aspect, though we did implement it with facts on your friends. The second game is similar to scribbl.io. The last game is a icebreaker quiz game, which we tried to model after kahoot (active waiting room).
How we built it
We are all beginners when it comes to hackathons, and not too well versed in web development. We spent a bunch of time researching how to support multiplayer games in JavaScript, and ended up opting for PubNub. We spent an additional period of time acquainting ourselves with PubNub and concepts such as client, host, packets, and eventHandlers.
We mainly split up for this challenge. Though our individual projects all related to mutliplayer minigaming, there wasn't too much overlap between them (no shared data, really), so we mainly worked together but in silence as we churned out code.
Challenges we ran into
There were quite a few challenges brought about by our inexperience. Things such as JavaScript not being typed, PubNub channels not registering when a user leaves a page immediately, and other nicks gave us a bit of trouble.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
All in all we are most proud of how much we learned. TAMUHacks was an amazing experience because, while a bit grueling, we were really forced to learn (and put to use our recently-acquired knowledge) a lot about web development. We're also proud that we've submitted our first ever hackathon project!
What we learned
We learned a ton about JavaScript and servers!
What's next for Ice to Meet You
Hopefully a few CSS spruce-ups :)
Thanks for reading!
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