Pet Wallet

Inspiration

The project idea was inspired by tomagotchi. We thought that if people could care for a virtual animal, that could provide incentive to be financially responsible.

What it does

Our project encourages the user to stick to their budgets by having a pet who's emotional state is attached to their ability to keep on budget.

How we built it

Mia wrote the backend in Python using Flask, WTForms, and sqlite3. Andrew wrote the frontend using HTML5 and CSS3. Sophie drew the artwork using ibisPaintX.

Andrew and Mia collaborated by using Git and specially planning their work so that they would run into as few merge conflicts as possible.

Challenges we ran into

Sophie ran into challenges when handling translucency in the artwork. They wanted the lighter-colored fins of the pet to be translucent and show other layers behind them, but the coloring and repeatedely changing the level of opacity in ibisPaintX was challenging. In the end, they didn't have enough time to make the lighter-colored fins on one ear translucent along with those on the tail. Fortunately, making translucent watery tears for when the pet is sad was more successful.

Mia ran into mild issues when connecting frontend code to backend code. The main issues were getting links for routing. She essentially just had to replace all of the hard-coded links with 'url_for()' in the jinja2 templates.

Andrew ran into a mild issue merging the code. He accidentally applied a set of changes to the wrong file. He resolved this by retracing his steps and undoing the changes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the artwork, the frontend design, and the backend architecture. We are proud of making every work together in a cohesive manner which we anticipated would be difficult.

What we learned

We learned valuable teamwork skills; we especially learned how to allocate work. Additionally, we improved our time management skills considerably due to the 24 hours deadline. Lastly we learned how to properly set priorities when having a tight deadline.

What's next for Pet Wallet

If Pet Wallet were to continue, it would have a propper login system, use a remote database rather than sqlite3, improve the artwork, make a mobile app for it, and most of all, clean up the code.