Flock Focus

Flock Focus!
Take control!
Stay focused!
Shammy the rock!

Inspiration

Time management can be tricky for all of us. Improving on your own can be even more challenging. An immediate visual representation of what your focus can achieve is game-changing when it comes to improving. And, let's be honest, sheep are adorable.

What it does

Flock Focus tackles productivity on your Windows laptop or desktop head-on: it asks you what you'd like to get done and starts the pomodoro- and a new sheep appears on your taskbar! If you stick to it and complete the task without getting distracted, the sheep gets sheared and joins your herd! If you get side-tracked, the extra wool generates a bit of... static electricity and the sheep might not want to stick around.

How we built it

Python!

Challenges we ran into

Python! In all seriousness, we've been having struggles with tkinter (the toolkit for application windows) throughout the whole weekend. Animating a transparent, always-on-top, scaled window is challenging if you don't know how to set things up from the very beginning. In its current state, you may not see all of the animations, but the features should be there!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Custom artwork! Hailey did an incredible job on the pixel art animations. Did you know it was Hailey's first time doing pixel art OR animation?! WHAT?! THE ART IS ALL SO GOOD! LOOK AT THE IMAGES!! SOME OF IT ISN'T IN THE GAME SO YOU BETTER APPRECIATE THE IMAGES DANG IT

What we learned

Research your external libraries ahead of time! This one was pretty particular about how it wanted to be set up. It's hard to fix something that integrated!

What's next for Flock Focus

We had plenty of ideas for "stretch goals" such as calendar integration, but we think the mission of Flock Focus is better to explore. Productivity software can be rough, soulless, and saddening. Flock Focus does things differently. Being a gamified software experience has its perks. Keeping individuals on track with adorable sheep could work a lot better compared to software primarily built for teams. Introducing time management at an early age could be made fun in elementary schools! And there's so many more potential applications that can make not just our individual lives better, but our collective time together being free of work time bleeding into our time.

Credits!

Hailey Donald: Art!! ALL THE ART!! WHAT?! GOOD!!!!! Casey Bach: CODING!!!! Kaitlyn Self: CODING!!!! Brady Walters: CODING!!!! Github Copilot (GPT-4o, o1-Preview, o1-mini, Claude 3.5-Sonnet), ChatGPT (4o), and Google Gemini: AI assistance! We didn't even ask Gemini for anything it just kinda showed up