What is iSquash?
Hello! We are the Super Cool Hacker Group! We want to introduce you to our super cool game, iSquash.
iSquash is an interactive game where you can choose to be a squash player or be a part of the crowd. And just because you are a part of the crowd doesn’t mean that you won’t have any influence on the game, because YOU WILL. As a crowd member you will play a pivotal role in iSquash by reacting with yays and boos to the player/players of your choosing. This affects the player/players overall performance. Did I tell you that you can also throw squashes? WELL YOU CAN!
How to play:
First, You will choose if you want to become a player of the squash game or a member of the crowd.
If you choose to be a player, traditional rules of squash apply, plus you are able to react to your opponent/opponents as if you were a part of the crowd.
If you are not familiar with the rules of squash you can catch up here: In squash, players can score points when they hit the ball in a way that their opponent cannot return it before it bounces twice on the floor or hits the out-of-bounds marker, this is a rally. If a player hits the ball out-of-bounds or blocks their opponent’s access to the ball this will result in a fault. Whoever commits a fault, the opponent is given the point. If the fault is a block, the opponent is awarded a penalty stroke. Finally, a let occurs when the game is stopped due to an interference, obstruction, or safety concern.
Let's continue. If you choose to be a part of the crowd, you will be able to react to individual players of the actual squash game. These reactions will have affects on the player they are directed to. Reactions include: cheering them on with a YAY, indicating frustration with a BOO, and expressing utter disapproval by actually throwing a squash, and you can just imagine what throwing a squash would do to a player's ego and health points;;
Additionally, bets can be placed on the players with the squashes given at the start of the game. All players and crowd members start off with a total of 50 squashes at the beginning of the game, these squashes can be used to place bets on a most favorite player or used to be thrown at a despised player.
How we built iSquash
- We built a Java Backend with SpringBoot with a React UI.
- We used controllers to help send HTTP requests from the server to React.
Challenges we ran into
The most difficult part of the project would probably be the time constraint combined with the amount of freedom/creativity we were given. Naturally, we were all used to coding for school projects in which the time to complete them would span from a week to a few weeks. Usually the project requirements are a lot more well-defined, so there's a much clearer goal to work towards. Also, a few of us have little to no experience with React so that proved to be a big learning curve.
What we learned
Through this hackathon we were able to learn more about design and fullstack engineering. We also learned more on how to make a functioning web-based game. For the beginner hackers in our group, this was a huge learning experience for frontend/backend coding and React.
What's next for iSquash?
- Had we had more time, we would want to create a functional reaction system, so that players would be able to interact more within the game.
- We'd also like to have a public leaderboard to share your betting accomplishments with other players.
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