Keep Alive

Inspiration

Our team is made up of first-years and this is our first Hackathon, so we wanted to do something fun and engaging to build our skills while also being beneficial to the user. We drew inspiration for the concept from self-care apps as well as more entertainment centered games such as Cookie Clicker on the web and Tamagotchi with the central game play loop. A desk plant was chosen as what the player cares for since plants are the most accessible living thing to take care of, especially for students.

What it does

"Keep Alive" has two key features are the task manager and the plant you take care for. The player will assign themself a task they wish to complete then assign the time it should take to complete it (Ex. "Clean out the car", 65 minutes). The webpage runs on its own 24hr -format clock, and will track the time you started until when you're supposed to be finished. The task manager will then begin a 30 minute timer which exists to give the player a time window to come back to the game and check off their task in order to receive points. The points will be used for the game's second feature, plant care. Points can be exchanged for store items like water, lamp bulbs, and flower pots for the plant you must take care of. The plant is raised from seedling, to budding, to bloomed, and grows based off of its current state. If something is amiss, such as not being watered in a fair bit, the change in status will be communicated to the player through the plant's current display. In the same vein, if the status of the plant is perfect, the display will change to let the player know that the plant is alright. Certain items face an increase in price per use, or are just expensive, which motivates the player to write down the tasks to do and fulfill them to earn points.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build the app. We've also used Figma for the wireframe and Google Sheets to keep track of our current progress. For assets not created using CSS, we've used Procreate. A GitHub repository was used to host the site, and Visual Studio Code was used to code.

Challenges we ran into

One of the first initial issues for the project was figuring out how we were going to collaborate when it came to coding. Issues in Visual Studio Code led to the page not appearing, but was resolved once we've began to maintain consistent git workflow and pulling frequently. Another issue was refining the CSS to look proper on the website, as well as debugging JavaScript code the further we were with the game.