jematala

low-stakes posting to people in your area

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Inspiration

Our inspiration was games like Pokemon GO and Pikmin Bloom, which encourage players to visit new locations or reach out to other people playing the same game. We wanted to create a social-media-style game where people can make disappearing posts talking about things happening in the area, and then others can add notes of their own or add fun self-made stickers.

What it does

Jematala is ultimately a game involving posting a disappearing billboard with your thoughts on it, replying to others' boards on sticky notes, and graffiti-ing notes you like or dislike. There are quests and leveling in the game, allowing loyal players to post more billboards and notes every 24 hours. Players can also visit points of interest to learn about areas, see others' thoughts on a landmark, and contribute to locations. We want players to feel free to express themselves in any way through the game, without too many limitations.

How we built it

The app uses Expo and React Native for the frontend, with a pixel-art visual style, map-based navigation, custom avatars, billboards, stickers, quests, and profiles. Our backend runs on Cloudflare Workers with Hono, Supabase Postgres/PostGIS for location data, Drizzle for database access, Clerk for authentication, and Durable Objects for real-time updates.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was combining real-time social features with location-based interactions in a way that felt lightweight and fun. We also had to coordinate across frontend, backend, database schema, shared validation types, authentication, moderation, and deployment in a short timeframe. Building a consistent interface across web and mobile while wiring it into live APIs also took more polish than expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the design of the app - we aimed for a unique, cosy style that strays away from the standard look of apps, games and websites nowadays. We want this to be a game that players will happily return to over and over again. We're also proud of having made it a mobile app, as we can now release this game to real app stores and receive user feedback on our design and model.

What we learned

We learned how to work in a team on

What's next for jematala

We want to work on push notifications and improving the game-ification of posts. We also want to work on better user analytics and reporting as users try out our app through DevSoc Starlight. We'd also like to eventually increase the number of features and things you can do in the game so that players want to play it more often, for longer.

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