Inspiration
This project was created with the intention of being used as a fundraiser for Dance Marathon at UF in order to raise funds and awareness for the Children's Miracle Network. We were inspired by a similar project done by a couple years ago that was used to fundraise thousands of dollars for DM at UF and allowed the participants to have fun and raise money in the process. Unfortunately the previous iteration was lost and so we decided to recreate the project in order to bring this tradition back to our campus.
What it does
Our application allows for the creation and moderation of the popular game, Assassins. The game is played in real life, but tracked on our application. It involves a user logging in through Facebook and being assigned a target. They then must silly-string that target in real life in order to obtain their targets keyword, which they will enter into our application to eliminate them from the game. It's a last man standing type of game.
How we built it
We built it using React and Typescript for the front-end, Google Firebase for the backend, and FireStore for the database, and Python for some scripts.
Challenges we ran into
Our first issue was designing the application and trying to determine what features would give the users a good experience. We tried to keep our front end design simple, and do a lot of the processing behind the scenes so the users could just play the game and not have to worry about too many details. Because we had done none of this design work ahead of time, we spent a large portion of our time on this step. We wanted to keep our web-app accessible to mobile devices, and building with 2 separate types of interfaces in mind sometimes caused conflict, especially when it would look good on one device and not the other.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Creating an application we plan on extending, up-keeping and presenting to an entire student body and organization to be used for fundraising purposes.
What we learned
Half of our team had never worked with React or Typescript before so this was not only a learning experience, but also a teaching experience for those who had. No one on the team had ever interacted with Google Firebase much so learning how useful it could be as a part of our application was an amazing experience.
What's next for Mission DM
Deploying it! Our app is ready to see the world, however we will continue to add features such as allowing people to create teams, team leaderboards, and implementing random events that change the flow of the game. In addition to this functionality we will collaborate with designers in the Dance Marathon Organization to improve the look and usability of the UI.
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