Inspiration
As incoming students it was daunting being on a new unfamiliar campus and city. While orientation was helpful, we still found ourselves trying to decipher building layouts, wondering what lies around campus and outside SEAS. With this question we decided to make an interactive game that helps students learn more about the instructors of the program, the buildings of the program, and close surrounding areas! Inspired by the nostalgic look of Pokemon and other classic games, we sought to make a fun way for students to feel at home once they get to campus!
What it does
The game will have the user navigate through the different SEAS buildings, where they will get tasks/have the opportunity to interact with Professors for their first fall courses and learn more about the program. The thought is to give a basic understanding of the buildings relative layout, how they are connected, all while introducing them to courses and professors they will have that semester.
How we built it
We used REACT framework with vite to deploy the frontend. While we implemented a nest/postgres backend, the current served game is a purely frontend implemented web game. We made use of different LLMs to aid in our development and understand of the tech stacks that we were using to help ensure confident debugging as we developed.
Challenges we ran into
We found that developing the backend and frontend independently operationally created a lot of challenges when it came time to connect the two. IT additionally reinforced the importance of not designing in a blackbox and coming together after. We were able to learn and adapt to successfully divide task work to deliver our final project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of how the game came out, particularly the gameplay and flow of the game. We were able to incorporate all features we had talked about, and feel it is a helpful and fun experience.
What we learned
We learned there a great deal that goes into implementing full stack development, and the importance of constantly ensuring that both portions of the project are on the same page to avoid any divergence and incompatibilities later on.
What's next for MCIT Freshman Adventure
We would like to fully connect the front end to the backend, which would allow us to create authorization schema, save game states, and allow for a more smooth scalability as a general orientation tool for all different colleges at the university.
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