My Cows! Roadtrip Wrapped

Inspiration

After spending too much time on our phones during roadtrips, my friends and I learned of a game, played by voice and with a piece of paper, that has passengers compete for who can have the most "cows" at the end of a roadtrip. The issue is keeping track of the score. Passing around a piece of paper and doing math on a calculator in quick succession is no fun. That's why we created this website for players to join and share a game, and from there they can use quick actions to add to their score. In addition, we added an element of the game to have players taking special attention to road safety. We added in the element of scoring different road hazard signs. That way, drivers and passengers pay attention to road signs that may have blended in with the many along their route. See more details on what players look for below.

What it does

Our mobile based website keeps people engaged on the road. It promotes observing your surroundings as you search for the below objectives: The Cow Game

"My cows!" : when a player sees any cows and exclaims "my cows," that player estimates and adds the amount of cows in the pasture to their cow count. -"Marry my cows" : when a player sees a church and exclaims "marry my cows," said players cow count doubles.
"Bury your cows" : when a player sees a cemetery, exclaims "bury your cows," all other players cows die.
"Mad cow disease" : when a player sees a hospital (human) and exclaims "mad cow disease," all other players lose half their cows.
"Cash in my cows" : when a player sees a McDonald's and exclaims "cash in my cows," said players cows are now burgers.
“Discount cows” : when a player sees a Dollar General and exclaims “discount cows,” all other players give caller 25% of their cows. The player with the most burgers wins. If there are no burgers, the player with the most cows wins.

The Roads Sign Hazard Game The below items all have a variety of points based on rarity

Rare and Common Crossing signs
Construction signs
Slippery when wet signs
Sharp Curve warnings
Rock Falling warning

How we built it

We used next.js framework in VS code with a convex backend and database to store game information.

Challenges we ran into

The language was new for Cora and Jessie, so it took us a while to get moving as we familiarized ourself with the framework and language. In addition, connecting the database to the front end lead to many road stops and difficulties when it came to tracking and editing game points. Version control was a struggle at first, but we grew with that quickly as our project grew, making it easier to organize tasks. Lastly, we struggled to add all of our ideal customization. We wanted to have more car options and cow accessories, but were limited here due to time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the website! This was a huge accomplishment for us in our first "real" Hackathon. There were many firsts for us and we learned a lot from this. In addition, we love our handmade graphics and how well they matched out original idea. We are very happy we got our backend working fairly smoothly with the front end. The teamwork was fun and we enjoyed staying up for 24 hours to accomplish what we did.

What we learned

We learned about next.js compatibility with a convex backend. This was a new relationship for us and we learned a lot about how to go about connecting the two and exchanging data. We learning how to utilize Copilot inline in VSCode through GitHub, which was incredibly helpful for troubleshooting our issues.

What's next for My Cows! Roadtrip Wrapped

We hope to make some extra polishing steps to the project and finish up some loose ends that weren't working quite as well as we hoped. This includes a private leadership board sharing a more specific "Roadtrip Wrapped" with intentions to share some fun facts about the stats they collected. We would also like to add some more cow avatar option as well as some fun accessories. In addition, we want to have a variety of car option to fit more situations. Most importantly, we all plan to use this on our next roadtrip!

Also- we tried registering a fun domain name with GoDaddy but it was down, but we plan to register it at mycowsgomoo.com