InHunt

Inspiration

I created InHunt because I noticed people were struggling to find ways to be entertained at home and connect with friends during quarantine. I wanted to solve this issue with a fun and unique game that encourages friends and family to remain active in an exciting and competitive way.

What it does

InHunt is a virtual scavenger hunt where players can build a hunt, invite team members, choose a duration for the game, and solve hints that lead to objects around your house to accrue points. The team that gets the most points in the allotted time wins.

Players would need to solve a riddle and photograph the answer/object. If the photograph contains the correct object, the player gets the points.

For example, if the hint is "What has a neck, no head yet still wears a cap?" the player would need to determine that the answer is a bottle and photograph a bottle. Then the photograph is analyzed to see if the bottle is there. The player that gets all the objects and gets the full points wins and the game ends. Otherwise, the game ends when the allotted time finishes, and the team with the most points wins.

How I built it

InHunt was created in Android Studio, and animations were made possible with the Lottie Animation library. The games are saved as documents in DocumentDB. Games contain the teams, individual players, and points gained in one document. The mock data seen in the video is from Gravatar.

Challenges I ran into

I didn’t have any knowledge of DocumentDB prior to this hackathon, so storing, querying, and indexing the JSON data was a new experience for me.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It was extremely gratifying to build a game from scratch. I’m proud that I was able to learn DocumentDB despite the time crunch. I’m also proud that I was able to stick with using Android Studio despite struggling with using its visual tools to lay out elements on a screen (writing raw XML files isn’t the most fun!).

What I learned

Increased comfort using Android Studio and the Lottie Animation Library
Experience with DocumentDB
Experience with UI design

What's next for InHunt

I would love to get this in front of more users, and it would be worth the effort to add more features. An additional feature I am looking into is allowing a player the ability to add goals to the app periodically. For example, if the player wants to get in 20-30 minutes of exercise that day, the app would make sure the person is extra active during the scavenger hunt by making sure he/she moves around to various parts of the house to find the objects (the hunt for an object in the kitchen, followed by the hunt for an object in your bedroom, etc). I would also like to work on automating the Gamemaster by pulling from a database of common household items for each hunt.