KittyCity

title
game
another part of the game
greeted by cat after completing the game

Inspiration

As pet owners, every single member of our team has seen first hand the ever growing overpopulation of animal shelters, and its devastating impact on the well being, health, and security of stray animals. Through KittyCity, we strive to do our part in tackling the long standing animal shelter crisis by raising awareness and directly driving people to pet adoption initiatives.

What it does

KittyCity provides a fun and interactive story driven experience that collects information on your personality traits, matching each individual to a cat that matches their personality best. This approach captures the virality aspect of personality surveys, while serving a real purpose in raising awareness and connecting people to animal shelters in Toronto.

How we built it

Using various scripts, we collected the information of over 300 pets in Toronto from petfinder.com, including names, descriptions, characteristics, and more. Using the Google Gemini API, we analyzed the descriptions and characteristics of each pet, rating them out of 5 categories: playfulness, affection, sociability, independence, and adventurousness. Finally, we built an interactive story experience that collects information of the user's personality, matching them to one of over 300 cats in our database.

Challenges we ran into

Petfinder.com no longer provides API keys for their services, which made it difficult to the information that we needed for our project. We overcame this using scripts to scrape the website and regex to capture the information we needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a fun and interactive way to connect people and pets. We believe that our approach combines the virality and fun aspects of personality tests to tackle a real and current issue in our local area.

What we learned

As inexperienced hackers, every step of the way was a learning experience, including learning how to incorporate API's, AI and working cohesively as a team. Although much of our initial planning sounded easy on paper, we arrived at challenge after challenge, solving them one step at a time, improving our collaboration and individual skills.

What's next for KittyCity

Obtaining an API key to Petfinder.com or a similar service that would allow us to have a more comprehensive data set and provide location proximity pet search across the world. Additionally, it would remove the need to maintain the database manually, as the data could be gathered at runtime, providing a more streamline experience.