Overtake

Lobby to create a party to play with/against

Inspiration

We wanted to make studying actually fun. Traditional flashcards and revision apps feel like a chore. Soo... what if you could race your friends while doing it? We're big F1 fans, so we built Overtake: a multiplayer racing game where your knowledge is literally your engine.

What it does

Overtake lets you upload your notes, which an AI quiz engine converts into adaptive questions. You and your friends race around a live F1-style circuit in real time. Answer a question correctly and your car bursts ahead, get it wrong and you stay frozen while everyone else creeps forward. Power-ups keep things unpredictable, and a live leaderboard updates as positions change.

How we built it

Frontend: React + Vite with a fully custom SVG F1 track
Backend: Firebase Realtime Database for live multiplayer sync, Web Speech API, Web Audio API
AI: Gemini API to generate quiz questions from uploaded notes
Deployment: Vercel

Challenges we ran into

Keeping multiplayer game state perfectly in sync was the hardest part, timing car movements, turn sequences and question phases across multiple players required careful coordination. Building a realistic F1 circuit in SVG and keeping cars accurately on the racing line was also surprisingly complex. Like many Hackathon projects, we had our fair share of merge conflicts - but we were somewhat more prepared this time. It was quite the sequence of git logs & git checkouts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting real-time multiplayer working smoothly and building a fully custom animated F1 track from was very rewarding. We also successfully integrated the Web Speech and Web Audio API that was built into Chrome.

What we learned

How to build a real-time multiplayer game from the ground up and utilising storage systems like Firebase. It was some of our team member's first times using React.js which was a great experience seeing as it is the industry standard. Also learning how to integrate generative AI into a live interactive experience and how it was the best way to get people to study is to make them forget they're doing it. We had fun practicing to demo it and putting in notes of our own university modules.

What's next for Overtake

We're expanding the game with a full power-up and debuff system, think oil slicks to slow down rivals, nitro boosts to surge ahead, and defensive items to protect your position. We're also adding bonus rounds that drop at key moments in the race, giving players a chance to dramatically swing the standings and keep every race unpredictable until the very last question.